All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

  Wu wrinkled his yellow brow when he said good night. Sally wrinkled her white one when I walked into our apartment, my ping-pong paddle sticking out of the pocket of my parka. She was learning to make onion soup.

  “You didn’t bring any wine,” she said. “You’re so busy trying to be the ping-pong champion of Chinatown that you can’t even remember wine. It’s a wonder you can find your way home.”

  “I agree,” I said. “It’s a wonder.” I liked the smell of onion soup, but it wasn’t enough. I looked at her and she was smiling quietly. She had forgotten I was there; she had even forgotten I had forgotten the wine. The fog was in and the apartment was cold. I sat down at the typewriter meaning to write while the soup cooked, but all I actually wrote was my name. I was too distracted to write and I sat quietly in my parka, holding my ping-pong paddle. I had no reason to be unhappy, no reason to pity myself, not one valid thing to complain of, and yet I was so sorrowful for several minutes that I couldn’t have moved or spoken. I hated myself when I got that way. It wasn’t manly. I was too healthy. It was ignoble to be so depressed, but I was anyway. I had acquired an independent depression. I was beyond my control, much like the fog. It didn’t take orders from strong, healthy, soon-to-be-successful, unself-pitying me. It came from a place of Fogs and Depressions and held me in my chair for hours at a time, making me feel lonely and unwanted and tired of everything in my life.

  I was in the kind of mood Jenny Salomea would not have tolerated for five minutes. In my mind I often heard her lecture me. Jenny Salomea had become the voice of reason, but in my life reason was like a ninety-seven-pound weakling in a Charles Atlas ad. My depression was twice its weight and could kick sand in its face with complete impunity. Reason’s lot was one of constant humiliation, and there was no likelihood that it was ever going to weigh more than ninety-seven pounds. I didn’t care. I had known all along that my brain was not going to win any fights—or impress any girls.

  Sally fed me supper and then went downstairs and spent the evening talking to the Beaches. I got in bed, or rather, on the mattress, and read The White Nile. I liked it very much and intended, as soon as I had finished it, to read all the river books that were mentioned in it. Almost every evening Sally went to talk to the Beaches, and almost every evening I sat on the mattress and read river books. Almost every day I went out to play ping-pong and see movies, and almost every day Sally stayed in the apartment, enjoying her new life. We inhabited the same place but sort of at different times. It was a very strange life—not a life anyone in his right mind would have wanted to lead. At least mine wasn’t. Part of the strangeness of it was that Sally was extremely happy.

  She had become happy shortly after our arrival, upon discovering that she was pregnant. “It’ll come about April,” she said, the evening the doctor told her it was positive. She sat by the window all evening, sipping wine and looking happy, and from then on she went through her days looking happy. She had beautiful color in her cheeks and she looked good with her hair in a knot and she became even quieter than usual. She sat around quietly, looking beautiful and peaceful. It was easy for me to imagine her with a baby. She would be a tall, lovely mother. Right away she bought a back pack so she could take the baby with her on walks through San Francisco. I could easily imagine that too. The one thing wrong with my many mental pictures of Sally and our child was that I wasn’t in any of them. All I could picture was Sally and the baby, and the reason was that Sally made it perfectly obvious to me that that was how she pictured it. I don’t think she used the pronoun “we” at all, after she knew that she was pregnant. For her our marriage seemed to have ended on that day. From then on she said “I’ll,” never “we’ll.”

  But pronouns were only the subtler manifestations of what really happened. What really happened was that she dropped me from her life. She dropped me so completely that she didn’t bother moving out, or making me move out. I had no tangible existence for her from then on. I couldn’t even manage to get in her way. I knew women were supposed to act strange when they got pregnant, and I knew they were supposed to make unusual demands on their husbands at such times, but I hadn’t expected to be required not to exist. That was the gist of it, though. It took me months to articulate it to myself, but my one practical function in Sally’s life had been to get her pregnant. I had performed it, and that was that. All she had needed of me was my seed. I gave it and that was that. In all other respects she was self-sufficient. She didn’t even say thank you for the seed.

  From then on she served me meals as if I were a ghost, a hungry vapor that had happened to drift into the room. Her judgment on my existence carried a lot of authority with it, too. I began to feel like a ghost or a vapor, and to act like one as well. At first I didn’t accept nonexistence. I continued to try to act like a living human. The evening we got the word about her pregnancy I wanted to make love. I touched Sally and she gave me such an odd look that I took my hand away immediately.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to fuck,” she said.

  Apparently she thought it was something that would be self-evident, though I don’t know why. We had made love almost daily, since we had met, and Sally seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. Then, abruptly, we weren’t making love anymore. What she really meant when she said she didn’t want to fuck was that she was through with me sexually. At first I couldn’t believe it. It was too abrupt. We didn’t taper off, we didn’t grind slowly to a halt, we just stopped. I made passes and Sally rejected them with a single look, a look that made me feel I had absolutely no right to touch her. For a few days I held back, thinking it was a mood. Surely it was a mood. She liked sex too much for it not to be a mood. We had been having enjoyable times—there was no reason for them just to stop.

  But they stopped without a reason. I let a few days pass and tried again. Same look. She looked at me the way she might have looked if a total stranger had walked up and put his hand on her cunt. The look made me a little desperate. I was her husband—I had some rights. I decided to be firm. I tried to ignore the look and keep on with my pass. Sally frowned once, but then her look changed. She looked completely indifferent. She didn’t let my making a pass at her discommode her at all. She didn’t even look unpleasant. She looked as if she were lying in bed alone, thinking about something remote, like the isles of Greece. I had proceeded to the point of getting between her legs—I was pretty determined—but somehow her look of pleasant indifference wrecked my play. I felt awkward and stupid. Why had I thought I wanted to make love to a woman who wasn’t even affected by my presence between her legs? It was absurd. Sally didn’t look cold or stiff or frigid. She looked like a warm, lovely woman who happened to be lying in bed alone. The attentions I tried to pay her were so ghostlike they didn’t even make her look jostled. It was an eerie moment—I didn’t entirely forget it for months, and as months followed months I became very unclear about it. Maybe I didn’t really get between her legs or go inside her. I ceased to know. But when I spoke again that night I wasn’t between her legs.

  “Sally, what’s happening?” I asked.

  She was completely silent. I was not sure she had heard me. I couldn’t make her feel and I couldn’t make her hear.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “I don’t understand why.”

  “There doesn’t have to be a why,” she said, turning over.

  That was virtually her only comment on the change in our lives. She sat up and picked up her comb and began to pick the hairs out of it, and when she had done that she went to sleep. I stayed awake for hours, maybe for weeks. I can’t remember having really slept, in my months on Jones Street. I made no more passes at Sally and I didn’t even try to talk to her about what was happening. The fog, San Francisco, and the new Sally were too much for me. She had convinced me of my nonexistence, I guess. She was not a talking person, and I all but lost my powers of speech. She never complained and she was not bitter. She was just finished with me. Her body
told me so a hundred times a day. If I put my hand on her shoulder at night her body automatically shrugged it off. The authority with which I was rejected simply numbed me. I sank within a few days into a state of glum will-lessness. In my most optimistic moments I assumed that things would change, sometime, somehow. Sally was very happy. Sooner or later she was bound to notice me again. A light that had been switched off would be switched on again, eventually. Even if she didn’t love me she was bound to want to screw, sometime. She liked it too much to give it up overnight.

  It was trying, living with someone who had forgotten my existence, but I consoled myself with the thought that it was temporary. She was sort of an odd girl. Perhaps her pregnancy was just odder than most. She might remember me, after a while. I played ping-pong, lived in my parka, wrote bad pages, met writers in bookshops and never saw them again, read Wu’s novel, went to the movies and slept sex-lessly beside Sally, who seemed to grow happier every week. I thought a lot about Texas, but couldn’t remember it. Finally I tacked a Texaco road map over my typewriter and stared and stared at it. I was hoping it would solidify me in some way, but it didn’t. For four whole months I didn’t feel solid at all.

  8

  MY QUIET LIFE in San Francisco lasted until almost Christmastime. One foggy week went by, then another foggy week went by. One silent evening was followed by another silent evening. Sally and I never raised our voices, to each other or to anyone else. We waked chaste, and I heard myself murmuring good morning; often the next thing I heard was myself again, murmuring good night. Sally was only morning-sick three times. Then one day I was ejected from my quiet life, and just as cleanly as I had ejected myself from my quiet life in Texas, a few months before.

  That afternoon I had put on my suit and had gone to a photography studio and had had twenty-five dollars’ worth of pictures made. Random House had been bugging me for a picture, to put on the dust jacket of my novel. Their publicity lady had written me three letters about it but I was so habit-ridden that it took me three weeks to get around to doing anything new. I figured twenty-five dollars ought to get them a nice selection. If I had thought about it I would have gotten a haircut, but I was already at the studio before it occurred to me that my hair was awfully long. The photographer didn’t seem to think it odd, and I hoped Random House wouldn’t. It was the first time I had worn a suit in San Francisco.

  Sally wasn’t home when I got back, but there was a letter in my mailbox from Emma Horton, and also one from my editor. I hadn’t heard from the Hortons since we had moved, and the sight of Emma’s name, in her handwriting, unnerved me a little. I wanted to save it for a few minutes, so I read my editor’s first. He was coming out for New Year’s, for some reason, and wanted to get together with me. He said there were going to be literary parties. I tried to imagine a literary party and was unable to. It was a very abstract effort, like trying to imagine a triangle or a cube. Wearing a suit made me feel even more abstract. I had a mental picture of me inside my suit, inside a party, inside a building, inside San Francisco. I didn’t know what I was doing, inside so many things that were unlike me. Emma’s return address, written in a ball-point pen on the outside of her envelope, was the only thing that pertained to me that I had seen in months. It had a power that return addresses on envelopes don’t usually have. I felt really shaky, but I was just about to open the letter anyway when there was a knock on the door. I supposed it was Wu, and stuck the letter in my hip pocket, a little glad to have an excuse to save it longer. It wasn’t Wu, though. It was Andrea Beach, her skinny face full of anger.

  “I’m tired of waiting for you to do something,” she said. “I’m going to see that you do something. That’s why I took off early.”

  She walked past me, into the apartment, and stood by the window, screwing up her face and biting her thumbnail. She was a redhead and she wore a very proper, pretty suit. She was obviously very exasperated, and I had no idea why.

  “Look, what are we going to do to them?” she said. “We have to do something. I can’t stand it anymore.”

  I suddenly had a bad feeling. Andrea Beach was a cool, composed girl. She was not the type to get upset at random.

  “Do to who?” I asked.

  “Don’t play dumb with me,” she said. “They’re down there fucking and you know it. She fucks him every afternoon. Why don’t you stop her? Don’t you ever fuck her yourself?”

  She must have seen from the look on my face that I was just getting a message. Her look changed a little.

  “Well, you’re pretty dumb,” she said. “You must not notice anything. It’s been going on for a least a month.”

  I was speechless. For a moment I took refuge in the hope that Andrea Beach was incredibly paranoid. But that hope was the tiniest of canopies. In no time I passed out from under it.

  “Why do you think I took off early?” she said. “I never take off early. I’ve been waiting all this time for you to stop her. Do you think she goes down there to listen to Willis practice his goddamn cello?”

  “But aren’t you her friend?” I asked. “I thought you two were friends.”

  Andrea suddenly began to cry. “No, no!” she said. “That was just the only thing I could try. I thought if I made her my friend she wouldn’t be able to do it. I know Willis has no resistance—he just sits down there helpless. It gets boring, being blind. I don’t really think he likes classical music all that much. I don’t blame him. But I couldn’t make her my friend. She doesn’t have feelings. She’ll take anything.”

  She was so upset she couldn’t stand still. She kept pacing around our apartment, biting her thumbnail. I just felt sick. I wished I hadn’t been wearing my suit. The fact that we were both dressed up made everything all the colder and the more unnatural. I felt as if I were on some kind of stage, only there wasn’t an audience, just a skinny girl crying because my wife was fucking her fat, blind husband. I knew I had to do something for her but I didn’t feel capable of choosing what to do.

  “Do you have friends?” I asked.

  “One or two,” Andrea said, sniffling. “Why?”

  “I don’t have any here,” I said. “I was thinking that if you had some you might want to go see them for a while. I’ll do something about Sally and Willis. Right now I don’t know what, but I’ll do something. You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Andrea said. She shook her head dejectedly. “Willis thinks he’s in love with her,” she said. “When you make her stop seeing him there’s no telling what he’ll do. I better stay around. He might hurt himself. I guess if I didn’t leave him alone so much it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  “No,” she said. “I have money. I just like my job.”

  We were at a strange impasse. Neither of us wanted to go down to the Beaches’ apartment. We both felt indecent, I think. I felt very indecent. Even if what was happening was happening two floors below us we were somewhat involved in it. We didn’t want to go down and get more involved in it, but we couldn’t help being involved in it to the extent that we were. I was a husband and she was a wife. I didn’t know what it meant, but I realized suddenly that, whatever it meant, I hadn’t been equal to it. Maybe Andrea felt the same way. She gnawed her thumbnail.

  “I’ll stop her,” I said. “I don’t know how, but I will, even if I have to take her back to Texas. Do you want to take a walk?”

  “I guess,” Andrea said.

  We took an unusually silent walk. I think we walked twenty blocks without saying a word. The city was very gray. We didn’t see anything interesting. We were both deep in thought. I had never been so deep in thought. Sally had been with Willis every afternoon for a month or more. Andrea had convinced me. It gave me plenty to think about. When we got back to Jones Street it was late in the afternoon.

  “She’s gone by now,” Andrea said blankly.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, at the door of her apartment I don??
?t know why I said it. Her face looked pinched. She had plenty to worry about.

  Sally was sitting by the window when I got in. She was wearing her black sweater and eating a peanut butter sandwich. She looked tranquil and lovely. She didn’t look at me. She was looking at the bay.

  It was a hard moment. I took a deep breath. Then I put myself between her and the window. I blocked her view. This made her look at me. I wasn’t so nonexistent that she could see through me. She looked at me to see why I was bothering her.

  “Andrea was just here,” I said. “I know about things. Why don’t you pick on somebody who has a chance?”

  She only changed expression very slightly. She looked slightly annoyed with me. “Get out of the way,” she said. “Who do you think you are?”

  She was sitting on a cushion. I leaned down and put my hands on her shoulders and shoved as hard as I could. She scooted halfway across the bare floor. She wasn’t hurt and she didn’t change her expression much now either.

  “Why don’t you go out on the street and look around the next time you’re bored,” I said. “The Beaches were getting along fine until we came along.”

  Sally sniffed. She could look complacent and scornful at the same time, somehow. If I could have killed her for anything I could have killed her for that look. Nothing could make her uncomplacent.

  “He’d never even fucked anybody but her,” she said.

  “That’s nothing to be scornful of,” I said. “Maybe monogamy is the way things should be. Now they’ll have awful trouble.”

  “She could have stayed out of it,” Sally said. “It was none of her business.”

  “Yes it is!” I said. “She’s married to him. She tried to be your friend. Don’t you even want your friends to have good lives?”