All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

by Larry McMurtry

  “You maniac!” Mrs. Bynum said. Her voice wasn’t steady anymore. “I want to go in, Lloyd.”

  They turned and left, but I didn’t stop. I followed them up the sidewalk, weaving from side to side and chanting “Cunt vagina cunt vagina cunt vagina cunt” as if it were a football cheer. Mr. Bynum took Mrs. Bynum’s arm and hurried her on. They stopped at the hospital door and looked back at me with expressions of complete confusion on their faces. We looked at one another. I stopped the obscenities. “Sexual intercourse,” I said quietly. They knew my weapons. They merely stared. Finally they went inside.

  It had worked. For maybe a minute it had been fun. For maybe a minute I felt some little triumph in it. I enjoyed the expressions on their faces. They could not believe what they were hearing. But my sense of triumph vanished quickly. By the time I got back to El Chevy the triumph was gone, and I was desperately depressed. It had been a cheap victory, and I was aware of it. I should have chosen the expensive victory, which would have been to let Mr. Bynum knock me down three or four times. As it was I had really beaten myself. I looked at the windows of the big hospital and felt more hopeless than I had ever felt. I could barely find the hope to start the car. Probably now they could convince anybody that I was a maniac. I couldn’t imagine the baby as my daughter. I didn’t know what father and daughter meant, for us. But I could imagine her as a tiny creature and I knew I had probably just failed her in some major way. How many years would it take me to fight my way to her now? It might not even be possible, or good for her even if it was possible. I had no idea. I sat for a moment, wondering if there was any way I could sneak in past the Bynums and get a look at her. If I could see her I might have more of an idea what to do. But I didn’t try. I knew I was too tired. I had no strength left for subterfuge. Hope was draining out of me too fast. I had to get a tourniquet somewhere. I knew I had to. I couldn’t afford to lose too much more hope.

  A kind of emergency had come, after all. My head rang and the rest of me felt numb. I drove to Emma’s and managed to walk up her driveway. She was there. She opened the door. She didn’t rush out and hug me, as she might have in former days. I was not returning in triumph. I was limping home.

  Emma was still round. Her face was a little thinner, but the rest of her was still chubby. I was really at a loss for introductory words, and I don’t think Emma was prepared for me to look the way I looked.

  “Hi,” I said. “I made it back.”

  “Good,” she said simply. “You better come in and eat.”

  16

  I WENT IN. The moments of the evening were spaced very far apart. Emma and I couldn’t talk. My life had gotten that awry. Even Emma, I couldn’t talk to. She stayed over by the stove cooking for what seemed like a long time. I sat in a daze, and ate in a daze, when she brought me the steak. It embarrassed me, that I couldn’t talk. It meant I was totally cut apart from people. Emma didn’t try very hard to talk to me. She looked at me with big eyes. At some point she said she couldn’t stand me in suits. My suit was awful anyway. It was wet and muddy and the crotch was badly pinned. I went to the car and got some Levi’s and changed into them. Then I sat on a couch in the living room and Emma bathed my ear. I think I told her it was hurting. She bathed it in warm water. She put a towel on my shoulder so my T-shirt wouldn’t get wet. I just sat on the couch. A lot of hope had drained away. I was not thinking ahead at all. Emma’s house was kind of messy, lots of newspapers and books strewn around. We were not talking at all. I was trying to think where to go when Emma finished bathing my ear.

  But Emma put herself in front of me. It was a moment. Her round serious face was in front of me. She was across my lap. I held her. Then her face disappeared. She was nestled in my arms. Her face was out of sight.

  “I was going to stay completely away from you, but I just can’t,” she said, her voice very meek.

  I was a long time doing anything but holding her. We were a long time saying anything. Maybe it was an hour that we sat, hugging. We were just silent. Finally we looked at each other and I kissed her.

  “I think about you a lot, Danny,” Emma said. Another moment. We were on her bed undressing. Our making love was full of catches. Not so much physical catches, but some kind of catches. Being together didn’t really enable us to escape our lives. We both wanted a lot more than to make love. I don’t know what Emma wanted, or even what I wanted. We wallowed in the dark, straining for something more than could be gotten from two bodies. Emma was very fervent—she seemed to feel she had to get me quick or she wouldn’t be able to let herself get me at all. A lot of guilt was in the bed. Emma made a strange sound, coming. We didn’t talk. We lay all night, now just inside sleep, now just outside it. There was a sense of tiredness, guilt, bodies not used to each other, feeling not really expressed. Houston hummed around us—cars passed, planes flew over our heads, ambulances wailed in the distance. It was hot and quiet. In the first of the light we were awake. We could see each other dimly. We needed to try again. In the murky, drizzling dawn, we tried again. It was not night, not day, not past, not future. A little more delight was possible. “Don’t come, don’t come,” Emma said. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and one of her hands gripped my shoulder. The sound she made was almost scary, part squeal, part sob. We slid back a little ways inside sleep.

  When we came awake again it was a bright sunny morning and everything was different. The wallowing and strain of night, sex, guilt, apprehension, need and desire—all those were over. Emma and I were lying in bed, quite friendly. We were resigned, but calm, not downcast. I had betrayed a friend, she had betrayed a husband. Apparently we had wanted to. Undoubtedly we had. We didn’t feel like talking about it, or excusing ourselves. We felt like criminals, but like criminals who were resigned, not only to their criminality, but to their sentence. We hadn’t heard our sentence yet, whatever it was, but we could accept it. It couldn’t make us not like each other. We held hands. For a chubby girl Emma had surprisingly tiny breasts. They were almost all nipple. She was a little embarrassed by them.

  “I’ve always wanted to grow my hair long enough to cover them,” she said, pouting a little. “My damn hair won’t grow that long.”

  Her hair didn’t even come to her shoulders. I tried pulling it down. “No chance,” she said. She pulled mine down. It was almost as long as hers.

  We lay in bed for a while, very quiet, seeing each other’s bodies for the first time. My ear was very swollen. Then Emma got hungry and we dressed and went to the kitchen. She wore an old blue dress that I remembered—she never seemed to get new dresses. The kitchen was as nice as ever, sunny and cheerful, and Emma made me everything I could think of that I wanted. She had got some sausage. I ate more than I had eaten in days, and drank a quart of milk. When we finished we sat at the table, playing hands. Emma was quiet and reflective.

  “Are you having problems?” I asked. We hadn’t even mentioned Flap.

  “Me?” she said. “No. I don’t have problems.”

  “You looked like you did, last night.”

  Emma smiled. “You were in no shape to judge anybody’s problems, last night,” she said. “My God. They’re taking your daughter away from you. That’s a problem. I don’t have anything like that hanging over me. Flap’s bored with me and goes off with his dad fishing every weekend and I resent the hell out of that, but that’s not a problem. He doesn’t like to fish that much—he’s just bored. I don’t resent him being bored. I just resent him going off with his dad. His dad’s just as boring as me. He ought to stay and be bored with me—he married me. But that’s no problem, that’s just normal. Two people get married and pretty soon one person is bored. It’s just ordinary life. It’s certainly no reason to feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Do you feel sorry for yourself?”

  “No. I just resent Flap. I’d feel sorry for myself if I had a baby and somebody was trying to take it from me, though. That would kill me.”

  “I guess babies always get to stay with moth
ers, don’t they?” I said. “I don’t know what to try and do about it.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Emma said. “You couldn’t get her and you couldn’t raise her if you could get her, and you can’t live with Sally. That’s three things you can’t do. If you could get her Flap and I could raise her for you, but you can’t get her. You’ve just lost your child.”

  “I don’t have any real idea of her,” I said. “I don’t even know what I’m losing.”

  Emma looked out the window. Tears came in her eyes. “You will, someday,” she said. “I guess you will, if you ever find out anything about what’s normal. I’ve always known personal things were desperate. Personal troubles. I’ve always known it. Seeing you last night almost destroyed me. I can’t even help you. It’s going to be hard for me even to be your friend, now.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I guess that was the sentence we had been resigned to, in bed, earlier. That was probably what screwing had done. Taken away our chance for long friendship, of the kind we had had. We might love each other and stay on each other’s side forever, but we couldn’t have the sociable things of our friendship again, at least not for years. And who could imagine years? I couldn’t even imagine the day. I could imagine Emma and I trying to be together in Flap’s company, and I knew neither of us wanted to. We hadn’t been ashamed of it, in the bed in the quiet morning, but that nice hour of our lives was past forever.

  “I’m sure going to have to feel guilty for a long time,” Emma said, not self-pityingly, just as an observation. A fly lit on the sugar and she waved it away.

  “What about Flap?” I asked. I wasn’t clear what I was asking, even. I just said it. I hadn’t said it to accuse him of anything, but Emma took it that way.

  “No, it’s not his fault,” she said, looking down at her lap. “A man should be able to go fishing with his father without his wife sleeping with his best friend. Flap’s very good to me, usually. I’ve just always been selfish. I’ve always wanted you. I bet I would have grabbed you last night even if you hadn’t looked so terrible.”

  I didn’t want her to get blue. I scooted around to her side of the table and put my arm around her. It helped a little, but the trouble was that we couldn’t linger with each other. We had had our night, and day had come. Flap and his father might come back unexpectedly. They might be bored with fishing. Besides, we had done all we could do. A good time together in the morning, breakfast in her kitchen, a nice hour of talk. We weren’t going to go back to bed and screw again. We couldn’t solve anything by talking. I put my arm around her and she put her hands on my forearms and we sat for thirty minutes, staring across the breakfast dishes, out the kitchen window, at the bright sun on the trees—we said scarcely a word. For a few minutes we were close, and utterly in accord. We had the same knowledge of everything—if we talked we would have agreed exactly on what was what. We agreed so exactly that we didn’t have to talk. We sat together. I rubbed Emma’s fat leg. Or rubbed the back of her neck. Her eyes were vacant. She was not thinking. She was just sitting with me. Simply sitting. It was my responsibility to go. When I felt I had to I went and got my awful suit out of the bathroom and wadded it up.

  “Going to try and see her?” Emma asked, at the door. She scratched her head.

  “Yes,” I said. “If I go right now maybe nobody’ll be there.”

  “Call me if they arrest you,” she said. “Are you going back to California?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Oh. I’ve got my book in the car. One for you, I mean.”

  “Good,” Emma said.

  She came down the driveway with me. I got the book out of El Chevy and stood trying to write something in it. Emma stood near, looking at me oddly. My nose and eyes were hot suddenly—I couldn’t think of anything to write and I felt big emotion coming. I wrote “To Emma and Flap with love, Danny,” and quickly handed her the book.

  “Best I can do,” I said.

  Emma’s round face was changing. We managed an awkward hug. “You ought to throw that suit away,” she said. “Please don’t marry for a while.”

  “You mean until I get smarter?”

  She had gone to the sidewalk. “Oh, Danny, nobody cares about that,” she said, with a crooked smile.

  She turned and went up the driveway, a chubby girl. She had always had an awkward walk. Emma only moved gracefully in her kitchen. Otherwise she looked better sitting down. She would never be graceful, or without a large behind, and I would never be smart, or have a normal life. It’s no wonder we got on so well.

  I drove to Methodist Hospital, to try and see my daughter before I left for wherever I was going. It didn’t work at all. A thin tough little East Texas nurse with a mouth like a wire turned me back.

  “You can’t see that baby,” she said. “You’ve got legal problems. I heard what a fuss you made last night. Your wife’s mother nearly had hysterics. I’m calling the police boys right now.”

  I had been disheartened before I came in and I was much too disheartened to try and fight my way through policemen and up elevators to wherever my daughter was. No one would bring her out of her crib to show her to me anyway, and I would probably get life imprisonment if I broke into the nursery without getting a haircut first.

  I tried to imagine her, three stories above me, and it was very hard. I gave up and left and drove to Jenny’s house. She was outside, in a pair of shorts and a white blouse, working in her flower beds. She had many flower beds, with great flowers growing in them. She didn’t notice me parking and I sat and watched her dig for awhile. Since leaving Emma, my spirits had gone straight down, and they were still dropping. Not only had I screwed up my friendship with the Hortons, but I had knocked myself out of a love affair with Jenny, as well. I couldn’t stay in Houston. It was the one thing I knew clearly. The Bynums would just have me arrested, and I was too depressed to go to jail. But even if I didn’t get arrested, I couldn’t stay. I would just make Emma uncomfortable. We would become one another’s problem, instead of one another’s friend. We would always be wondering if Flap would find us out—or worse, we would always be wondering if we were going to do it again. I just couldn’t stay. It was going to be a big disappointment to Jenny.

  I got out and went across the yard. Jenny heard me and turned, standing up.

  “Are you mad at me?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to be so late.”

  “No,” she said. “I could tell you were too drunk to be dependable. You didn’t marry anybody, did you?”

  “No.”

  We went in her kitchen and she made me some iced tea. She was hot from her yard work. I climbed up on the woodblock and squatted on top of it, talking to Jenny while she fixed the tea. I told her about the scene I had had at the hospital. Jenny brought her tea to the woodblock and sat on it with me. She drank iced tea and I kissed her. The tea made her mouth cold. We played delicate little kissing games for a while. Jenny was learning. She was very subtle. She had a kind of tact about it all that was very affecting. I grew hornier and hornier. Horniness had had little to do with what Emma and I had done. It had had something to do with it, but not much. On Jenny’s woodblock, lust took over. I would not have thought it could survive so much travel and tiredness and craziness and trouble, but it did. We managed to get nearly undressed, but the woodblock didn’t do as much for Jenny as it did for me. It just made her uncomfortable. We ended up on her huge, extremely comfortable living room couch. We crowded into a corner and I worked off a lot of lust, much more than I’d expected I had. Jenny was very surprised. It was largely a new world for her. She wasn’t the master of it, but she liked it.

  “Boy,” she said, when we were resting, cuddled up together in one corner of the couch. We had stopped moving, and the air conditioner was freezing us.

  “Boy what?” I said.

  “It’s strenuous, isn’t it?” she said. “I hope I’m not too old for it.”

  “You’re not,” I said.

  To my dismay and Jenny’s
irritation, Sammy Salomea walked into the far end of the living room, neatly dressed in seersucker. I couldn’t seem to fuck his wife without him showing up. It was indecent of both of us. Jenny and I stayed huddled.

  “Will this nastiness never cease?” Sammy asked.

  “No, it won’t,” Jenny said. “Quit looking at us. Go find you a friend.”

  “Don’t forget to shower,” Sammy said, and left.

  “When you get a place we can do it there and he won’t always be interrupting us,” Jenny said.

  My lust was gone, leaving me with nothing but the sad thing I had to tell her. I didn’t want to. She was a generous woman, unhappy in her sex life. I would have liked to spend months on beds and couches with her. She could be having orgasms, pretty soon. It was amazing that she could have stayed so nice, after so many years without them. Anyway, I had to let her down. It made me feel awfully low.

  Jenny noticed. “Was something wrong with me?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Stop thinking that way. You’re wonderful.”

  “People are supposed to be happy after sex,” she said.

  “How often have you been happy after it?” I asked.

  Jenny sighed. “You couldn’t call Sammy sex,” she said. “I’m happy after you.”

  “I’m happy after you too,” I said. “I’m low for other reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  I told her. I told her all about the night and Emma and why I had to leave. She watched my face all the time I was talking. I told it quite straight.

  “I guess it’s because you’re so young,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I meant that you could fuck your friend and then come right over the next day and fuck me. Sammy could never do that.”

  She was silent, her face blank. Then she twisted around and put her face against my chest. I held her tightly. I knew she was crying because I felt her tears on my skin, but she didn’t make any sound. She just quivered occasionally. It seemed to me that I had spent a week just saying goodbye to women. I was thankful there were no more people who cared about me.