All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (26 page)

“Can I come tonight then? After my party.”

“Yes,” she said. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.”

“Good luck with Sally,” she said. “I hated you for marrying her.”

“The universe in general disapproves of me,” I said. “For that, and many other things.” I was a little bitter. Why hadn’t anyone spoken up sooner?

“I don’t disapprove of you,” Emma said. “I didn’t say that. I’ll cook you something when you come. You haven’t really changed,” she added, in a more satisfied voice. “If I’m asleep when you come, bang on the door.”

I hung up and went out into the hot April afternoon. I was sort of up against it. I could fiddle around looking for a room to live in, or I could go confront Sally. I didn’t want to do either one, but I was getting tired again and I didn’t know how much longer I’d have my wits about me.
I got back to El Chevy and went to the address Godwin had given me.

Sally was there. As usual, she had been napping. As usual, she hated being awakened. She was wearing a loose, sleeveless dress. I had never seen anything like her stomach. I thought it was large when I had shoved her in the bathtub, but it was nothing then to what it had become. Her stomach amazed me. Sally leaned against the doorjamb, trying to stop yawning long enough to frown. Her hair was tangled and her face a little puffy from sleep. Her stomach almost split her loose dress, it was so big.

“You can’t talk to me,” she said. “You must be out of your head. You could be put in jail for being here.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I came home because you were having the baby.”

“I’m having it, all right,” she said. “I had pains this morning. It’s none of your business, though.”

“It’s my child too,” I said. “I came to see if I could help.”

“It’s not yours,” she said. “It’s mine.”

For some reason, seeing her stomach changed things. I wouldn’t accept the words she was saying. The stomach was not Sally. It had a roundness that wasn’t Sally. It lived of its own, attached to her. It shook a little, when she moved.

“You better fuck off,” Sally said. “Daddy’s coming. I’m going to the hospital. You’ll never see my baby.”

“It’s just as much mine,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It’s in me.”

“Who put it there?”

Sally shrugged. “I fucked a lot of guys,” she said. “You’re not important.”

“Sally,” I said. “I was in Austin yesterday. I think I broke Geoffrey’s neck. I threw him off a roof.”

“Good,” she said. “Then maybe they’ll put you in jail, where you belong. I think you’re a sex maniac anyway.”

“You’re utterly illogical,” I said.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ll tell them you’re a sex maniac. I’ll really make them put you in jail. You’re not going to see my baby. You couldn’t be a good father.”

“I came home to try,” I said.

I wanted to try, too. The baby would soon be alive, like Jenny was alive, like Emma, like Jill. I hadn’t realized that. I had only thought of it as a picture of an embryo, like I had seen in books. Seeing Sally’s stomach changed things.

“You married me before I knew what I was doing,” Sally said. “You ought to have to go to jail.”

“Shut up,” I said. “I found you living with one queer and sleeping with another. You did screw Geoffrey, didn’t you?”

“Why not?” she said. “He’s a lot cooler than Godwin.”

“I hope I broke his neck,” I said. I meant it.

“You tried to murder me, too,” Sally said. “You ought to go to prison for life. I don’t want this baby to know he has a criminal for a father. He’s going to have a respectable life.”

I was dealing with a mad person, and I was just making the future more impossible than it already was. I decided to back off.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m not going to bother you. I didn’t come to fight. You have the baby, but I’ll keep in touch. You might need money.”

“I can marry Rick Leonard,” she said. “He’s got ten times as much money as you’ll ever have. He’s not sloppy and he wears good clothes. If my father saw how long it’s been since you had a haircut he’d really beat you up. You’re a disgrace to our whole family. None of us ever want to see you again.”

“None of us ever did, except you,” I said.

“They’ve heard about you, though,” Sally said. “They know how awful you are. Your book’s even supposed to be dirty.”

“Why’d you pick me to get you pregnant?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” she said. “That was an accident. I’m not even sure it was you.”

“It was me,” I said. “Nobody else you know could have made anything live in you. I happened to be able to love you, even if you were a bitch.”

“Listen, are you calling me a bitch?” she said. “I’m gonna call the cops and have them get you right now.”

We were locked in combat. I was tired of being threatened with cops. I was tired of being threatened, period. I felt strange. For all I knew I was coming apart. Sally’s look wasn’t blank. It was hot and insolent. I hated her so I thought my temples would burst. She hated me too. Her armpits were hairy. We stood a foot apart, only her belly between us. Suddenly she kicked at me and tried to slap me. I caught her wrist and held it.

“Get your hands off me, you fucking maniac,” she said. “Can’t you see I’m pregnant?” She wrenched free and stepped back inside. “You maniac,” she said again, and slammed the door.

I drove away. She probably would call the cops. I didn’t want to go to jail. I went to Hermann Park and parked under some trees and calmed down. It was hot and sultry and I dozed. When I woke, strings of traffic were passing. I felt tireder when I woke up than I had ever felt. I could no longer believe in sleep. It didn’t work for me anymore. It was like struggling with my eyes shut. If I had to struggle I would rather struggle with my eyes open.

My party was in two hours and I looked terrible. I was totally scruffy and had no place to clean up. It would be
my first evening as an author. Up to then I had only been a writer, and I didn’t know if I could make the change.

Rice was nearby so I drove over and cleaned up in the second-floor bathroom of the library. I tried to wash my hair, but I couldn’t get my head in the lavatory. All I did was get my hair thoroughly wet and soapy. Getting the soap off was very difficult. I put on my suit and to my dismay the zipper fell off. It simply came off in my hand. My crotch was unclosable. It upset me badly. How could I go to an autograph party with an unclosable crotch? My suit was in bad shape anyway. It had fallen down on the floorboard of the car at some point and had gotten terribly wrinkled. I didn’t have the poise to be an author, I didn’t think.

As I was going out of the library, my old clothes held in front of my crotch, I met Dame Juliana. Her bosom quivered with indignation at the mere sight of me. It had been in almost constant motion for years.

“Aren’t you ever going to mature?” she said. “You look worse than ever. We ordered your book.”

“Thank you,” I said. I always felt humble in her presence.

“Are you going back to school?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

She snorted and bustled off. It occurred to me then that I should have lied to her. Maybe she would have given me my key back. I could have lived a secret existence in the library. I could live on the fifth floor, amid the religion stacks. No one ever came there. I could sneak out at night and slink over to South Main and buy cheeseburgers. I had thirty-four thousand dollars in the bank in San Francisco. If I lived in the library it would probably last me my entire life. Probably now and then I could waylay a coed. It wouldn’t be a bad life. I could read the church fathers, or anything else I wanted to read.

But I hadn’t lied, and my crotch was unclosable. I went to
a drugstore and got some safety pins. They weren’t very long, but they were the best I could do. I pinned myself up. I didn’t do a very smooth job, but I was too tired to be patient and effective.

In some respects, life hardly seemed worth living. My hair was unruly, the tie I had meant to wear had fallen out of the car at some point, and my crotch was like a pincushion. Outside, it was coming a thunderstorm. If Bruce had been there to see the spectacle I was about to make he would have resigned his editorship in disgust. I was probably a disgrace to Random House.

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.”