All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (18 page)

After breakfast every morning I went to the Piltdown and wrote. I invented a hero named Jerry and dashed right into my baby-bed novel. I felt very reckless about it and wrote very rapidly, probably to keep my mind off the fact that I didn’t know where I was going in the novel. Jerry was incorrigibly foolish, especially with women, so I decided to call the novel “The Man Who Never Learned.” I took the novel home to Jill, a chapter at a time, and she read it sitting on my bed. One of the wonderful things about her was that she was not jealous of anything I did. She loved for me to write, and she loved for me to read. Her only complaint about my novel was that Jerry was too foolish, but she giggled while she read about him, even so. I figured that if it was good enough to make Jill giggle it couldn’t be too bad, so every day I went to the Piltdown and dashed off ten pages more.

Once I finished my daily writing I went to the San Francisco
public library and carried home books for the night. Almost all of them were travel books, or narratives of exploration. I developed a fascination with South America and read myself right down the continent, night after night, all the way from Mexico to the Strait of Magellan. I enjoyed books about the famous explorers, but I got an even greater kick out of obscure travel books by obscure and forgotten travelers, ordinary little people who for some reason or another decided to journey up the Amazon or explore the Andes. I even read nine books on Patagonia.

Almost every night I read a travel book or two, with Jill sitting beside me on my bed. She had a great capacity for quiet, but it was not an ominous quiet, like Sally’s was. Often, in the late afternoon, we saw a movie and ate dinner out at some place cheap and came home slightly tipsy and just sat around all evening. I read, and Jill drew, or hummed, or listened to FM music on a radio she had brought with her from L.A.

She drew hundreds of sketches of the two of us going about our lives—most of them very comical sketches. Sometimes she drew Wu. Jill liked Wu, and we had him over often. He liked Jill and would stay for hours, sipping tea and talking about Andrew Marvell or Richard Crashaw. Another nice thing about Jill was her likableness. I couldn’t imagine anyone who would like me not liking her. During the day, when I was gone, she worked on her current project, which was an animated version of a weird Russian story called “The Nose.” It was by Gogol. Jill let me read the story, but she wouldn’t let me see her drawings for it. That was what she had been working on at Columbia when she had the fight and quit. Technically she was still under contract to do it, and it was something she took very seriously. She worked at least as hard on her animation as I did on “The Man Who Never Learned.” One of the many
things I didn’t understand when I brought her away with me was that within the world of the animated cartoon she was very famous. She really had won an Oscar; she really was establishment. Walt Disney had offered her fabulous money to work for him. As soon as her agent found out where she was she got daily calls and letters, imploring her to come back. No one in Hollywood could understand what she was doing in San Francisco, living with an unknown writer.

What she was doing was making me happy. She did it but it was a complicated kind of happiness, not simple at all. She hadn’t lied about being in trouble herself, and making me happy cost her a lot. “I’ve been ruined,” she said, after I had made love to her the first time. She said it flatly, as if it were just a fact she did not permit herself to feel sorry about. I didn’t believe it. I held her and kissed her face and looked in her eyes and tried to get her to tell me what had ruined her, so I could change it, but she wouldn’t tell me. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and we never did. Jill was always true to her own statements. She would never talk about it. I didn’t believe it anyway. I kept trying to make her happy without knowing what had hurt her in the first place and it was very complicated. She could be happy—often I did make her very happy, very pleased. But not by making love to her. She let me make love to her, after a while, but only for my sake. Her ethics wouldn’t allow her to live with me and frustrate me. “I have to be fair or I can’t live,” she said one time. I didn’t know what to do. Once I began to love her she became very sexy to me. I wanted her all the time. We had such fun everywhere else, I couldn’t understand it. Sex was virtually the only thing we did together that we didn’t enjoy. Jill just couldn’t. It was not an act she wanted to do. She only did it because
I needed it. I didn’t know what to do. The reluctant way she took her blue gown off made me very sad. “We have to stop,” I said one day, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. Jill looked at me solemnly, her gown half off. “Why?” she said. “I can’t stand it if you don’t like it,” I said. “I’m destroying something.” “That’s right,” she said. “You’re destroying my modesty. And I was letting you.” And she put her gown back on and went and put a pink robe over the gown. After that I seldom saw her without her robe on. We didn’t make love anymore. We sat on my bed and held hands and drank a lot of tea. Jill went back to being very modest again, which was her way. I could delight her and make her feel touched again, in little ways. When she was delighted, desire made me giddy. Jill’s instincts were delicate, beautiful things—it was painful but wonderful to observe the way they handled me. I was convinced all would change, though. I was convinced I could really win her, sometime. She didn’t think so.

“My son is my first problem,” she said. She always cried when she tried to talk about it. “I have too many traumas to raise him happily. Also I work too much. But if I don’t work I get in bad involvements and have worse traumas. It never really works out when I go to Santa Maria to see him. He’s really happier with my folks than he could ever be with me, and it makes us both feel awful. That was the nice thing about Carl. He took us on a couple of picnics and Johnny enjoyed them. A time or two I almost felt like a normal mother. But Carl was never very interested in me, really. He could always get sexier people than me. He just had a kind heart.”

It made me terribly sad, to hear Jill talk about her son. I wanted her to love me more than ever, not just for me but so she could feel normal. I never really said much about love, though. Jill was very intelligent, and I have no
knack for hiding my feelings. But we didn’t talk much about it. If I had poured out statements of love it would have just made her feel worse. I let it be tacit. One thing we agreed on was that love was something there was no point in asking for. It was either simple or impossible. If you had to ask for it, it just meant it was impossible.

A month after Jill came something really ugly happened with Sally. She had achieved her ambition and gotten a motorcycle, it turned out. She also had a boyfriend. His name was Chip Newton and he sold motorcycles in south San Francisco. Apparently he had given Sally one.

At Jill’s insistence I had fixed my money so Sally couldn’t check on it. I sent her three hundred and fifty dollars a month. It seemed to be enough for Sally but it wasn’t enough for Chip. He wanted to buy things. One day while I was at the Piltdown writing, they came to our apartment. Jill had never seen Sally and was curious about her. She let them in. Chip was a young hood, according to Jill. He did all the talking. Sally merely looked contemptuous. Chip walked right into the room where Jill drew and started picking up her drawings and looking at them. He didn’t ask permission or show any trace of politeness. The extent of his conversation was to say that they needed bread, and if I could afford to rent such a fancy place I could spare lots of bread.

Jill said he should take that up with me, and to please leave her drawings alone. Sally had wandered into my bedroom, without asking permission. Jill lost her temper and tried to grab the drawings away from Chip. He pushed her in the face with one hand. She went to the telephone to call the police and he strolled in and took the phone away from her and held it over his head. He made a remark or two about how skinny she was and how screwing her would
involve too many bones and got a Coke without asking permission and left. Jill wasn’t hurt but their total arrogance left her quivering for hours. She came to the Piltdown and cried.

“I shouldn’t,” she said, crying. “I ought to be above it. They’re both too cheap to bother about. It just made me feel so futile.”

I hugged her until she quit quivering. The insult to Jill made me furious.
I
hadn’t even got to see her drawings. As soon as I got her calmed down I walked her back to our apartment and headed for Jones Street. Foolishly Sally had never bothered to make me give back my key. The more I thought about somebody pushing Jill in the face the madder I got. I was hoping Chip would be there, so I could hit him with a chair. I knew just which chair I was going to hit him with. He wasn’t there, though. Sally was there, running a bath. She stood in the bathroom door, in jeans and her black sweater, looking at me haughtily.

“Who asked you in?” she said. “If my boyfriend was here you’d have to leave.”

The bath was running behind her. I didn’t say a word, or break stride. I had an inspiration, a gift from Godwin. Sally barely had time to change the expression on her face before I had shoved her backward and into the bathtub. I took her completely by surprise. When I shoved her in, water sloshed everywhere and I got almost as wet as she did, but I didn’t care. Sally thrashed wildly and for once looked more scared than mad, but she was in no danger. I just wanted to get her good and wet, and I succeeded. Her black sweater looked awfully soggy. “I’m going to call Daddy,” she said, sitting in the tub.

I left without saying a word and went to our apartment. I expected Chip to come and fight me. I waited that day and the next but he never came. Later I learned he had
been arrested for selling stolen motorcycles. The third day a deputy sheriff found me at the Piltdown and I was taken to court and served with a peace bond. Jill was more upset about it than I was. So far as I was concerned it was a small price to pay for wiping the smug look off Sally’s face for once.

Despite all the good times we had Jill and I developed a mutual, internal sadness. Sex caused it. It wouldn’t let us alone. It wouldn’t work for us, so it worked against us. I tried to approach it gently, I tried to approach it roughly, I tried to approach it drunkenly, I tried to talk about it, I tried being silent about it, and everything failed. She was right: she had been ruined. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know for how long, and I didn’t know what to do about it. A month passed, while we tried to live around it. Despite that much of the month was good, it was really no good. One night Jill came to my bed and woke me up. She sat on my bed in her robe and gown, twisting her hands.

“I worry about you,” she said. “What have you let me do to you?”

“I was dreaming,” I said.

She went to the window and stood looking out at San Francisco. “I wish I was loose like I used to be,” she said. “I can’t do it out of charity anymore. You should just rape me.

“Maybe so,” I said.

“No you shouldn’t,” she said. “You wouldn’t be you if you could do things like that. Somebody has to be like you.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She shook her head and went and made a pot of tea. We sat on the bed and drank it. I knew things were serious. Jill kept her robe wrapped tightly around her. We held hands. She was extremely modest.

“You’re the most modest person I’ve ever met,” I said.

She blushed and smiled. “At least you’ve made me positively modest,” she said. “Before you I only had negative modesty. Let’s drive to Berkeley. I have to go back to L.A. I can’t take advantage of you any longer.”

At four in the morning we drove to Berkeley in her bus. I was numb and unable to think of good arguments. She had an old mentor in Berkeley, an aged Danish theologian who had once been at UCLA. Once we had had a picnic with him, in the Berkeley hills, and he had brought along his equally aged love, an old woman who had lived in Berkeley forty-eight years, studying the Homeric poems. The old theologian was named Stigand and his lady friend was known as Lady Northford. She was English. They were both renowned scholars, both had snow white hair, and both were remarkably healthy and quick of mind. We sat in a backyard high in the hills and watched the sky behind the Golden Gate. The sun disappeared early, behind Mount Tamalpais, and soon great rollers of fog came in and hid Mount Tamalpais and the Bridge and San Francisco and then the Bay. As we watched the white fog come toward us Jill drew sketches and the old man and old woman talked of the Greek Islands, which they had both often visited, and of D. H. Lawrence, whom they had both known well. They were a very argumentative old couple and gave each other no rest, but they were extremely polite to Jill and I. They invited us to join them for their daily swim, which they took in an ice-cold lake somewhere in the hills. Jill said they had been lovers thirty-five years before, and had separated, and married, and had their respective spouses die, and then had come together again, widow and widower. The old woman spoke of Homer with extraordinary respect, as if he were an honored relative whom many misunderstood. Their features were not the tired features of the old
people I was used to, but lean and chiseled, perhaps from years of swimming in cold lakes.

When Jill and I got to Berkeley there was nothing to do but drive around Cal in the fog. We were numb with the imminence of parting, and didn’t talk. After twenty minutes or so we went back across the long bridge to San Francisco. On Vallejo Street the light was dim. We stood in front of the bus in the cold fog, holding hands.

“I’d ask you to come with me down there, but it wouldn’t work there either,” Jill said. “I don’t want to love anybody. I don’t want to repress you out of existence, either. I’m not a woman anymore, I’m just an artist. All I can do is draw. It’ll happen to you if you don’t get a girl who’ll sleep with you. You’ll wake up someday and you’ll just be a writer. I’m not worth it. Nobody’s worth it. You’d be better off staying a man.”

I was too depressed to talk. “Drive careful,” I said. It was all I could think of to say. I knew I couldn’t stop her from going. She was right to go. We couldn’t be any different. We had tried to change things, and we hadn’t.