Free Boys and Girls Together by William Saroyan Page B

least.’
    â€˜Change them. I’ll get supper, too.’
    â€˜All right. If they’re going to get clean, they might as well get into clean beds, too. Will you make a green salad, with the wine vinegar from Vanessi’s?’
    â€˜Sure.’
    â€˜Yum yum,’ the woman said, ‘if you know what I mean.’
    She’s happy all right. She’d be happy all the time if nobody ever had to do anything but have fun and not think about anything else all the time.
    She’s right, too. She’s got a perfect system if it would work. I’d go for that system any day if it would work.

Chapter 15
    They were eating. It might have been the thousandth time.
    â€˜What did you write today?’
    â€˜When?’
    â€˜This morning, when you went upstairs.’
    â€˜I’ve forgotten the precise words, but they were
words
.’
    â€˜What did you
expect
them to be?’
    â€˜That’s
all
they were.’
    â€˜That’s all any writing is, isn’t it?’
    â€˜No, that’s precisely what writing
isn’t
.’
    â€˜Well, what were the words
about
, then?’
    â€˜Nothing. If writing were words, writing would be easy. Writing is stuff that happens in spite of words. There’s no other way for writing to happen than
with
words, but at the same time it’s got to happen in spite of them. The thing that gets you in writing is the story the words themselves don’t
tell
but make you
know
. It’s something like that.’
    â€˜Well, what did you
think
about, then?’
    â€˜I thought about money. It’s the only thing I thought about. Most people forget it. I can’t. I think about it all the time.’
    â€˜We need an awful lot, don’t we?’
    â€˜We need thirty thousand. To start, I mean.’
    â€˜Would that pay the debts and
everything
?’
    â€˜Yes. I figured it out on a piece of paper and thirty thousand would pay the debts and leave a little.’
    â€˜How much?’
    â€˜About seven thousand.’
    â€˜What could we do with
that
?’
    â€˜Take it and run. Sit on it. Look at it. Smell it. Put it in silver dollars and stack them up in piles in the living-room. I was thinking of paving the hall with them. It wouldn’t take more than two thousand and it would make quite an impression on visitors.’
    â€˜On me, too. What else did you think?’
    â€˜I thought if I changed a thousand dollars into dimes—just a measly thousand—this would be a rather petty and annoying thing because they’re such small coins.’
    â€˜What else?’
    â€˜I thought if I had a nickel for every dollar I pissed away in my life I’d still be rich because twenty nickels make a dollar and there ought to be about two hundred thousand of them.’
    â€˜How did you spend two hundred thousand dollars?’
    â€˜It was easy.’
    â€˜You spent most of it before you met me.’
    â€˜I spent a little after I met you.’
    â€˜How much?’
    â€˜Thirty thousand a year, I suppose.’
    â€˜Six years. What’s that come to?’
    â€˜A hundred and eighty thousand.’
    â€˜Is that all?’
    â€˜Maybe it was forty thousand a year. That would make it about two hundred and forty thousand.’
    â€˜You spent something the year we weren’t married, too.’
    â€˜I would have spent that anyway.’
    â€˜You would have spent the two hundred and forty thousand anyway, too, wouldn’t you have?’
    â€˜I don’t know. Anyhow maybe it’s not the spending that makes the difference, maybe it’s whether or not you’re earning it to spend, and I’m not. I haven’t written anything that has earned anything since I got out of the Army.’
    â€˜Or since you got in. How many years is that?’
    â€˜Three in, three out. Six.’
    â€˜That’s how long we’ve been married, too. But you haven’t written anything