All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (17 page)

Almost before she completed the story I knew I wanted to steal it. I told her so right away and she didn’t seem to care. It could be my second novel. I didn’t know any of the people, so I could invent everything but the baby bed itself. It seemed to me the perfect subject—a picaresque novel with a baby bed as hero.

Jill thought it was very interesting of me to think of such a thing. Her clear eyes lit up and we began to try and think of a title for my novel.

“I wish I could illustrate it,” she said. “I’ve never done drawings for a book.”

She got some Beverly Hills Hotel stationery out of a drawer and did a quick sketch of a baby bed with twelve funny babies in it. She drew very fast.

I thought the sketch was charming. She had personified the baby bed, somehow. It looked like a mother. In a way it reminded me of Emma Horton. “That’s wonderful,” I said. Jill blushed. All the funny babies looked different. While I was watching, Jill drew some more. She was very bold and funny in her drawings. She drew a sketch of the
baby bed hitchhiking through Mexico. Then she drew one of the baby bed on the banks of Lake Louise. Her face changed when she was drawing. She became very sexy. I leaned forward gently and tried to kiss her. She let me for about one second and then drew her face back. She was very tentative and hesitant. She wouldn’t let my face near hers again. She stopped drawing, though, and we lay on the bed looking at each other.

“I’m older than you,” Jill said.

I didn’t say anything. I was very tired, and I was thinking how accidental things were. If I had left Leon O’Reilly’s office one minute earlier I would have been in the elevator when Jill was having the fight. I wouldn’t even have met her. I noticed she had gone to sleep. I guess she trusted me. I went to sleep too. When we woke up the room was full of sun and Jill was sitting up, drawing sketches of the baby bed. She had used up all the stationery and was drawing sketches on the back of other sketches. She looked much perkier than she had the day before.

“I shouldn’t have given you that story,” she said. “It would make a great cartoon.”

“Go to San Francisco with me,” I said. “We’ll compete for it. If your cartoon is better than the novel I write I’ll burn the novel.”

“No, you should never burn things,” Jill said, looking at me seriously for a second. “What you should do is give it to the sea.”

She was drawing again. When she drew her face became beautiful. I tried to kiss her but she ducked. While I watched she did a little sketch of my novel being given to the sea. I had just dropped it off the Golden Gate Bridge and a scholarly-looking sea gull was trying to read it as it fluttered down into the bay. Then she did a sketch of me. My hair was very uncombed and I was standing on the
Golden Gate Bridge looking forlorn. In my hand I held an empty box on which was written
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
. Finally she did a tiny sketch of herself being presented an Oscar. Jayne Mansfield, mostly bust, was making the presentation. When she finished Jill let me kiss her for one second.

“I mean it,” I said. “Go with me.”

“I know you mean it,” she said. “You couldn’t be insincere if you tried.”

“You’d like it,” I said, though I realized it was a silly thing to say. What I meant was that I liked her.

“I’ll go,” she said quietly, looking me straight in the eye. “But you’ll be sorry. I’ve got nothing to lose. I may come back here in two days. I probably won’t even sleep with you.”

“Why not?” I said.

“For one thing, I’m in love,” she said. “He’s a cinematographer and he’s been in Europe for two years and he never loved me anyway but it’s still there. Carl’s one major hang-up. Sex is another. I’ve had problems and I’m scared of it now. Also my son’s a big hang-up. I have bad guilt feelings about him. I’ve got more hang-ups than I’ve got good points. Besides, you’ve got a pregnant wife and you’re obviously very dutiful. If she wants you back you’ll go. I’m a very weak person or I wouldn’t even think of going with you. I just want someone to make my decisions for me.”

“I don’t mind that,” I said. “I make decisions easily.”

“Of course you do, dummy,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent of them are wrong, but you make them.”

“Can we go in your bus?” I asked. “I don’t know how to get to the airport.”

“A cabdriver could probably direct you,” Jill said dryly.

Cabs had just occurred to me as she said it. I still wanted to take the Volkswagen, though. Driving to San Francisco
would be fun. Jill didn’t care. “You’re making the decisions now,” she said. She did a funny little sketch of two people fucking under the baby bed. Three babies hung over the rail, trying to get a glimpse of what was going on.

We went to her apartment and she showered and put on a blue and white striped sweater that made her look ten times as sexy as she had looked standing in the hall at Columbia Studios. When we left for San Francisco, late that afternoon, she left a light burning in her apartment.

“I don’t know when I might be coming back,” she said. “I hate stepping into dark apartments.” At Santa Barbara we stopped and ate seafood. While we were eating the sun went down into the Pacific Ocean. Jill sat in the same side of the booth with me. We held hands. From time to time I tried to think of Sally, and of what might happen, but I couldn’t. Jill was too present. She continued to tell me about the adventures of the people who had had the baby bed. “We were a wild lot,” she said. “I had an abortion when I was sixteen.”

I was thinking about sleeping with her. She was awfully shy and nervous and I knew it was probably going to take a few days. I didn’t care. We ate and drove on and Jill talked until midnight and then flaked out in the seat, her head on my thigh.

At three o’clock in the morning I parked the bus in the tiny little parking lot across from the Piltdown and led Jill up and left her on my creaky bed. I went back down to make sure the bus was locked. At the other end of the parking lot a couple of drunks were throwing rocks at a garbage can. I couldn’t imagine where they’d got the rocks. There was no one watching the counter at the Piltdown so I went back myself and got my mail. There were two air mail special delivery letters, practically the only two special deliveries I’d ever received in my life.

I took them to my room to open them—Jill was sleeping peacefully so I settled down in a chair. The first letter was from Leon O’Reilly and contained an outline of the movie I was to write. Sure enough, he had given the bad son a wife who was in love with the good son. In order not to lose the rape scene, he had had the bad son get drunk and rape his own wife. He had even given the good son a bad wife. Maybe I would make her rape her own husband. I felt very lackadaisical about the whole project.

Then I opened the other letter. It was from Bruce and contained a check for thirty-six thousand dollars. A note from Bruce said, “Leon pays promptly.” I held the check in my lap for several hours, and sat and watched Jill Peel, who stayed asleep.

WHEN I
woke up, still clutching my check, Jill was trying to put a pillow behind my head. She looked great. She had only to wash her face to look fresh and intelligent and lovely, and she had washed her face. She had even cleaned up my room, somehow. It was the cleanest it had been since I moved into it. Jill had on another striped sweater, and pants and sneakers. She was somewhat put out with me.

“You’ve probably got a crick in your neck,” she said. “You’re already letting me trample you. You could have slept on the bed. I’m not that hung up.”

“I didn’t mean to go to sleep,” I said.

“I’m really compulsively neat,” she said, noticing me looking the room over. “It’s one of the reasons nobody can live with me. I guess it’s all connected with my sexual problem. Everything seems to be.”

Her face had already become dear to me. I liked the little blue shadows under her eyes. She gave me one of her looks, to see if I was going to hate her for having a sexual problem. Meeting Jill’s looks made me wonder why I had ever been fool enough to think Sally was vulnerable. She
might be vulnerable to cannonballs, but she wasn’t vulnerable to people. Loving her didn’t make her face change—neither did hitting her. She was not affectable.

Jill’s face changed constantly. She was always affectable, always vulnerable. The penalty she paid for being honest was that she lived most of her life poised on brinks. They were real brinks too. At first the sight of Jill poised on a brink scared me badly. I had no confidence in my ability to pull her back, and if I said something false or wrong and she went over she would really go over, into some kind of different life. She never poised on phony brinks.

“I don’t mind your being compulsively neat,” I said. “I’m compulsively sloppy. We’ll complement each other.”

She looked so darling that I got up and tried to hug her. She wanted to be hugged, but the hug didn’t really work. We were awkward and unfamiliar with each other, and just nervous. We weren’t used to being in small rooms with each other.

Fortunately we were both hungry. The minute we got on the street we both relaxed. Jill had a blue windbreaker, to go with her blue sneakers. She hooked her arm in mine and we walked several blocks and went in a diner and ate sweet rolls and drank several cups of tea. We talked about things we read in the paper.

“Gee, I’m glad we still like to talk to each other,” Jill said. I put my thirty-six-thousand-dollar check on the table. Now that I was back in the neighborhood of the Piltdown, that much money was an unreal thing. “What should I spend it on?” I asked.

Jill frowned, considering. “You could save it for when you grow old,” she said. “I’ve always thought I’d go to India, if I got a sudden windfall. I’ve always wanted to go to Benares.”

I couldn’t think of any place I wanted to go, which surprised her.

“You ought to be more interested in the world,” she said.

I agreed, but I just wasn’t. I was interested in her. My interest made her slightly fidgety. It was a lot more serious than the thirty-six thousand. After breakfast we walked over to California Street and put the check in my bank. Jill said she would talk to her broker and find out what I ought to do with it. In the meantime, I just put it in my checking account. The teller was absolutely flabbergasted.

The sun was out and we decided to take advantage of it and find a place to live. Jill had kept the want ads from the morning paper and had circled several places that might be possible. She turned out to be extremely picky about apartments. I wasn’t, so I let her do the picking. I enjoyed just following her through apartments, watching her response to each room. She had extremely keen responses. We finally took a beautiful four-room apartment on Vallejo Street. It had two bay windows, and very white walls. Jill loved it immediately. It was always full of light, and we could see the bay from every window. It was pretty expensive, but with thirty-six thousand dollars in my checking account I couldn’t have cared less.

Jill wouldn’t let me give up my room at the Piltdown, though.

“Not yet,” she said. “Not until we see if I stay. If I stay for a while we have to think of your work, you know. You need a place completely away from me. You have to get back to writing. If we try to work in the same place we’ll use each other as an excuse to sluff off.”

I didn’t care. The thought of living with her entranced me, and I really sort of liked the idea of going down to the Piltdown to write. Jill was very firm about my writing. She insisted that I start the novel that afternoon, while she went
off in her bus to look for furniture. She had extremely high standards in secondhand furniture. She refused to spend my money on anything that cost over twenty-five dollars, so she ended up buying most of the furniture herself. We started off with two mattresses and one chair. Two days later she found a table. Eventually we had two beds, a table, four chairs, two bureaus, and a couch made from a door. We also had lots of bright cushions. All our kitchenware was blue except for a yellow teapot and an orange frying pan. We had a bookcase made from dark bamboo. It took Jill ten days to find the things she wanted. Only one room had a rug, a beautiful green rug from India.

Jill was choosiest of all about colors and wouldn’t let anything in the apartment if it wasn’t a good color. White was her favorite color, but she also liked yellows, blues and oranges. She couldn’t exist without flowers, either. They were a necessity of her life. Fortunately there was an old man with a flower shop only two blocks away. Jill soon became his darling, and he sold her irises and pansies and tiny roses. I could always make her blush and look pleased by buying her a bouquet. She was very shy when she was pleased and wouldn’t come near me at such times, but she was often very pleased, anyway.

In no time Jill had me enthusiastic again. Mostly I was enthusiastic about her, but some of my enthusiasm spread to other parts of life. She made me get up in the mornings and take an early morning walk with her, no matter how cold and foggy it was. I soon got so I loved to walk in the early morning. Then she made me all the breakfast she felt it was proper for me to have. She had very strict ideas about food and was very opposed to people overeating.

“Not only is it wasteful, it’s bad for you,” she said, giving me a sliced orange on a blue saucer. She also let me have
wheat germ and honey and milk and lots of oranges. Sometimes I got a sausage, because Jill knew I loved them.

“I’m indulging you today,” she said. She didn’t indulge me often. One of the things that really griped her about me was that I was by nature self-indulgent. I was very casual about it, which according to Jill was the worst possible way to be.

“Sprees and feasts are one thing,” she said. “I don’t mind them. But just casually buying things or gobbling things is awful. How can you ever really appreciate anything if you slop around indulging yourself?”

“I appreciate things,” I said. “I appreciate many things.”

Jill admitted that I did. “I guess it’s one of the things I like about you,” she said. “You let yourself do anything you want to do. I repress myself too much. I could have lived in Sparta. If I were left alone I’d probably repress myself right out of existence.”