All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel by Larry McMurtry

advance on my novel, but we were in the process of adjusting to California and didn’t have time to adjust to money too. My brown typing table was only one of the many things I missed about Houston. In the cold, gloomy late afternoons I invariably grew depressed and sat at the window for hours. I huddled in my parka, watched the gray fog envelop Alcatraz and thought wistfully of how hot and muggy it must be in Houston. The things I missed most about Texas were the Hortons’ kitchen, my typing table, and the sun.
    Sally was much happier than I was. She bought a black sweater and wore it everywhere. Her hair got longer and she learned to tie it in a knot. She made friends with a young couple who lived on the ground floor of our building. We lived on the third floor. They had lots of room and we had lots of view. They were the Beaches, Willis and Andrea. Andrea was a skinny girl from Michigan; for some reason she distrusted me to such an extent that I never really got to make friends with them. Willis was blind but very well adjusted. Andrea worked for IBM and made lots of money and Willis stayed home and listened to classical music. He had an FM radio and sixteen hundred classical record albums. In the afternoons he practiced the cello. He was very good at it and Andrea was very good at whatever she did for IBM. Willis was very fat, probably because he sat around all day and ate cheese and drank wine while he listened to his records, but he was nice enough and he didn’tseem to mind being blind. The Beaches’ mutual competence turned me off a little. I would have thought it would turn Sally off, but it didn’t. She became their friend. She went down to visit Willis from time to time and on weekends took long walks with Andrea.
    My friend in the building was a writer named Wu. Wu was from mainland China and was writing a novel about conditions there. He was standing in the doorway of his apartment when I carried my typewriter into ours, and the first words he said to me were “I’m glad you are an author, too.” He always referred to us as authors. He was very dignified in manner, but the effect was spoiled by the horrible gray clothes he always wore. They made him look like a Korean refugee, whereas in reality he was a refugee from somewhere deep in China. He talked about China constantly—like Texas, it was apparently a hard place to leave behind. Sally thought Wu was about on par with Petey Ximenes. She begrudged him air space in our apartment. Wu was prone to long Oriental silences when she was around, and Sally matched him with long Sallyesque silences. Anything I said at such times sounded silly, but I talked anyway.
    Wu let me read his novel, which at the time of my arrival had reached a length of eighteen hundred pages. Wu was almost fifty years old and had been working on the novel for the entire nineteen years he had been in America. He was a great believer in revision and revised each section of the novel six or eight times before he went on to the next one. The novel was a kind of literary Great Wall. It filled all the shelves of Wu’s pantry. Its bulk really awed me—my first novel was only three hundred and eighteen pages in manuscript. Wu’s was nearly six times as long and it wasn’t even finished. Every time I went to visit him I carried home a hundred pages or so to read. It was called “TheHotbed of Life.” In many respects it reminded me of Henry’s screenplays, though I don’t believe the Seventh Cavalry ever appeared in it. It was full of the wildest improbabilities, some of which were never explained. In one sentence the story might leap thirty years ahead, and then in the next leap sideways two thousand miles across China. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I loved to read it. It was obvious to me that it could never be published in America, and probably not in China either. Wu was tranquil about it. It was his life work. He was studying English literature at San Francisco State College