Boys and Girls Together by William Saroyan Page A

‘They’re coming out to pay us a visit.’
    â€˜The hell they are.’
    â€˜They can stay upstairs.’
    â€˜They can shit. That’s where I work. Now, listen, I don’t want any trouble about your friends. Things are tough enough around here without a couple of phonies coming out here.’
    â€˜They have to go to Hollywood. They only want to stop and say hello.’
    â€˜Hello for a week? Write and tell her I’m working. I’ve got to get to work and you know I’ll never be able to with them around. It takes time to get ready to work and you’re always arranging for something to happen that will stop me from ever getting ready.’
    â€˜Can’t they come for just a
little
visit? She’s my best friend and he’s such a great man.’
    â€˜She’s a bore and he’s a bore.’
    â€˜I never see anybody out here. Just the people you know. None of my people.’
    â€˜Your people stink. Your sister was here for ten days a month ago. Two months before that your mother and father were here. Now don’t try to make me put up with these two, too.’
    â€˜O.K. I’ll write and tell her the kids are sick, but I think you’re mean.’
    â€˜The kids aren’t sick. Tell her I’m working. She’ll understand.’
    â€˜I can’t be rude.’
    â€˜It’s not rude to tell the truth. I
am
working. We’re broke. I’ve got to see about getting hold of some money.’
    â€˜O.K., I’ll tell her you’re working.’
    â€˜Now, don’t fool around the way you did about your sister. Don’t have her drop in on us and then give me a long explanation about how you must have misdirected the letter telling her not to come because she hadn’t received it, and now, as long as she was here, we couldn’t turn her away. Don’t do anything like that again. That was a dirty trick.’
    â€˜She didn’t get the letter.’
    â€˜If she didn’t, you didn’t write a letter.’
    â€˜You saw me mail the letter yourself.’
    â€˜Then you didn’t tell her not to come. You told her something else. Maybe you told her to pretend that she hadn’t gotten the letter. All I know is that we agreed that you would write and tell her not to come because I was working, and then a taxi came up to the house and there she was with six suitcases all the way from New York. No more of that.’
    â€˜O.K.’
    â€˜Just take care of your kids and let me see if I can start writing again.’
    â€˜I miss my people.’
    â€˜Your kids are your people now.’
    He went out and up the stairs and back to his work-table, but it was no use, he had no heart for the work, he had been fighting the idea of abandoning it for days, and now he knew it was abandoned. He’d worked eight days for nothing. It was the tenth or eleventh job he had abandoned in ten or eleven weeks. Well, he would have to start again and this time see that it was not a false start. But when he tried to think what would not be a false start, he could think of nothing that wouldn’t, everything would be a false start, anything anybody might do would be a false start, there was no such thing as a true start.
    He took the envelope with the snapshot in it, put a match to it, and tossed it into the fireplace. Then he got the cheque out of the other envelope and put it in his wallet to have when he went to the bank.

Chapter 12
    The way things were, he wished his profession wasn’t writing, but that was silly, writing
was
his profession, it had always been his profession, only now he didn’t want to write, didn’t want to try to write, never reached his work-table eager to see what he had written the previous day, the way it had been in the old days, all he wanted was money because he always needed money, maybe if he had enough of it once and for all, enough to pay his debts, and buy a