All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

indifferent to my success but they certainly weren’t indifferent to Sally. They didn’t bother to conceal their lust.
    The only person in the crowd that I liked was Flap Horton, an undergraduate like myself. He was wavering between history and English—I was wavering between English and nothing. Flap had only been married six months himself. His wife Emma was chubby and loved to drink. We all drank together when we could afford to. Flap had looked sheepish ever since he got married. He seemed to get skinnier as Emma got more chubby.
    When Henry finally got off the phone we went down to the basement and drank the rest of the champagne out of paper cups from the janitor’s water cooler. Petey was insecure amid so many Anglos. He chewed his hangnail. Despite Sally’s order he hadn’t turned off his waxer—it was somewhere on the fifth floor, still swooshing around. The history majors talked incessantly, trying to impress Sally with their erudition. Their effort was a big flop, as I could have told them it would be. Nothing bores Sally like erudition. She looked bored and remote, and she can bring offremote looks better than any woman I know, partly because she’s so tall and beautiful, and partly, I guess, because she
is
remote. She has very high cheekbones.
    Only Flap was really happy about my success. He generously got drunk with me—otherwise the celebration was a dud. Henry spent twenty minutes lighting his pipe. The history majors even bored
me
. Sally didn’t utter a word—she obviously wished she had gone on with her bike ride. We didn’t seem very married. I would really have rather finished the champagne with Jenny Salomea, even if it had led to adultery. I longed for Emma Horton to be there. She was my fan and was always pleased when I did something successful. I tried to hold onto a little enthusiasm, but I needed more help than I was getting.
    “Why do you always put the Seventh Cavalry in your screenplays?” I asked Henry.
    “Well, ain’t that the stuff of life?” he said. No one was listening. Getting a novel published was no way to start a drinking party, evidently. I had worked on the novel for over a year and suddenly I felt very strange about it. I was not certain that I liked it, or even wanted it to be published. Maybe it was really a terrible book. I felt flatter and flatter. Sally was glad when we finally left the library. I gave Flap the big, empty bottle—he said Emma might want to plant a vine in it. The night was warm and sticky and still full of mosquitoes.
    “I knew you’d make it if anybody did,” Flap said as he walked away.
    “Why?” I asked. People were always saying things like that to me and I couldn’t understand it. I lived in constant doubt about myself, and never expected anything I did to come out right.
    “Well, you’ve got discipline,” he said. He was carrying the bottle over one shoulder, like a huge club.
    Sally and I walked on home. It was true that I got up and wrote for a couple of hours every morning, but I had never thought of that as discipline, particularly. I just happened not to mind getting up early. In fact, I liked to get up early. I liked writing too—at least I usually liked it.
    Our apartment was about a foot below ground, not so good a thing in a place as swampy as Houston. The mats I used for carpeting were soggy, and the whole place smelled like wet straw. It was hot inside. The minute we got in Sally pulled off the T-shirt she was wearing. She had a beautiful long torso—even watching her back made me feel sexy. I got the carbon of my novel out of the box, to see if anything about it looked good, and I found I couldn’t read it. I just couldn’t focus on it. Sally had been thinking she might read it, but she hadn’t gotten around to it. I put my novel back under the bed and got out Paul Horgan’s
Great River
, which I was reading for the fifth or sixth time. I can always lose myself in books about rivers—I had read every book I