Boys and Girls Together by William Saroyan Read Free Book Online Page A

confirmed, laughed, and ran to get dressed. The man went from the lower flat where they lived to the upper flat where he worked, and where he and the woman lived when there was a nanny for the kids.

Chapter 10
    The upper flat was a shambles, but it always was. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke because he smoked so much whenever he worked or tried to. It smelled of not being lived in, too, and of fog and books. Books he hadn’t had a chance to look into yet, some of them on hand for months, not even unwrapped yet, piled on the floor and on the furniture. There were stacks of magazines mixed in with the books, mail, and manuscripts, pebbles and twigs and roots and branches of trees washed smooth and clean by the sea that he kept bringing home all the time. The pebbles were in small piles on the floor and furniture of every room in that flat, or in water in glass bowls because their colour came out in water, and the twigs and roots andbranches were leaning wherever he had found a place for them when he had first brought them home. There were rocks, too, chalk-white ones, brown, black, green and blue, most of them more or less egg-shaped, but a few of them flat or round, and these were strewn about all over, too, excepting those that were serving as paper-weights.
    He lifted the porous brown one that he was so fond of, that he had found at low tide in a cove somewhere south of Big Sur on Highway One, a cove he had driven back over Highway One expressly to find again because he had wanted to see if he could find out what was so wonderful about it, to make him remember it so much, to think about it so much, but he hadn’t found it, the sea had come up and hidden it and he had driven on, saying to the woman, ‘I can’t tell you how bad it makes me feel that I couldn’t find that cove.’
    The cove was hundreds of millions of pebbles just a little smaller than jelly beans all gathered together on a downward-slanting beach just beneath red clay cliffs three and four feet high with larger pebbles in smaller groups here and there, and now and then extraordinarily handsome rocks, all of them bright in the light, all of them a little wet yet, with seaweed strewn about over and among them, and little forms of life dead or dying or hurrying off to live some more among them, jelly things, leaf things, grass things, shell things, but nothing anywhere of man’s, no tin cans, no bottles,no broken glass, no paper, just the cove loaded with treasures which nearly maddened him to see, the air smelling of clay, wet rock, water and fish.
    It was ten or eleven in the morning, or at any rate sometime before noon, and he had been driving through thick fog since two in the morning, they hadn’t gone to bed at all that night although they had planned to, they’d had a nanny then, and they had planned to go to bed at midnight and get up at five for an early start, but the woman had said, ‘Let’s start now, let’s not sleep at all, let’s just get in the car and go.’ He was on his way that instant, going down the stairs from the top flat with the suitcases. They had had breakfast at the only place open in Monterey, ham and eggs and a lot of coffee, but it had only made them sleepy, so that after Big Sur the woman has asked him to please stop soon so she could go to sleep in the car.
    â€˜O.K.,’ he said, ‘just let me find a place to get the car off the highway.’
    An hour or so later he found the cove. He was there more than an hour while his wife slept, and then she got up and took off her shoes and stockings and went to him where he was gathering pebbles and rocks.
    â€˜The back of the car is full of them,’ he said.
    â€˜What do you want with them?’
    â€˜You know I keep pebbles and rocks to look at,’ he said. ‘Look at this one.’
    He handed her the brown one he was now holding.
    The woman held the rock and said, ‘Do you love me?’
    â€˜I