Richard Brautigan - The Abortion - An Historical Romance 1966

‘You’re sorry about what?’ I said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Foster said. ‘It’s for the best. You need a rest, a change of scene. You’ll be a lot happier now.’

‘Happier, what? What’s going on?’

‘Well,’ Foster said. He had his arm around Vida and she was looking up at him as he tried to explain what was going on.

There was a slight smile on her face that grew large and larger as Foster continued, ‘Well, it happened this way. I was sitting there minding your asylum when this lady came in with a book and she—’

I looked away from Foster towards the library where its friendly light was shining out and I looked inside the glass door and I could see a woman sitting behind the desk.

I couldn’t see her face but I could see that it was a woman and her form looked quite at home. My heart and my stomach started doing funny things in my body.

‘You mean?’ I said, unable to find the words.

‘That’s right,’ Foster said. ‘She said the way that I was handling the library was a disgrace and I was a slob and she would take it over now: thank you.

‘I told her that you’d been here for years and that you were great with the library and I was just watching it during an emergency. She said that didn’t make any difference, that if you had turned the library over to me, even for a day, you didn’t deserve to be in charge of the library any more.

‘I told her that I worked at the caves and she said that I didn’t work there any more, that her brother would take care of it from now on, that I should think of doing something else like getting a job.

‘Then she asked me where the living quarters were and I pointed out the way and she went in and packed all your stuff. When she found Vida’s things there, she said, “I got here just in time!” Then she had me take it all out here and I’ve been sitting here ever since.’

I looked down at my meagre possessions piled on the steps. I hadn’t even noticed them.

‘I can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘I’ll go tell her that it’s all a mistake. that—’

Just then the woman got up from behind the desk and strolled very aggressively to the front door and opened the door without stepping outside and she yelled at me, ‘Get your God-damn stuff out of here right now and never come back, not unless you’ve got a book under your arm!’

‘There’s been a mistake,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know and you are it. Farewell, creep!’

She turned and the front door closed behind her as if it were obeying her.

I stood there like Lot’s wife on one of her bad days.

Vida was laughing like hell and Foster was, too. They started doing a little dance on the sidewalk around me.

‘There must be a mistake,’ I cried in the wilderness.

‘You heard the lady,’ Foster said. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! am I glad to be out of the cave business. I thought I was going to get TB.’

‘Oh, darling,’ Vida said, breaking the dance to throw her arms around me while Foster started loading our stuff into the van. ‘You’ve just been fired. You’re going to have to live like a normal human being.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ I sighed. Then they loaded me into the van.

‘Well, what are we going to do?’ Foster said.

‘Let’s go to my place,’ Vida said. ‘It’s just around the block on Lyon Street.’

‘I can always sleep in the van,’ Foster said.

‘No, there’s plenty of room in my place for all of us,’ Vida said.

Somehow Vida had ended up driving the van and she parked it in front of a big red shingled house that had an ancient iron fence in front of it. The fence looked quite harmless. Time had removed its ferocity and Vida lived in the attic.

Her place was nice and simple. There was practically no furniture and the walls were painted white and there was nothing on them.

We sat on the floor on a thick white rug that had a low marble table in the centre of it.

‘Do you want a drink?’ Vida said. ‘I think we all need a drink.’

Foster smiled.

She made us some very dry vodka martinis in glasses full of ice. She didn’t put any vermouth in them. The drinks were done off with twists of lemon peel. The lemon lay there like flowers in the ice.

‘I’ll put something on the stereo,’ Vida said. ‘Then I’ll start some dinner.’

I was shocked by losing my library and surprised at being inside a real house again. Both feelings were passing like ships in the night.

‘Damn, does that vodka taste good!’ Foster said.

‘No, honey,’ I said. ‘I think you’d better rest. I’ll cook up something.’

‘No,’ Foster said. ‘A little logger breakfast is what we all need now. Some fried potatoes and onions and eggs all cooked together with a gallon of catsup on top. Do you have the makings?’

‘No,’ Vida said. ‘But there’s a store open down at California and Divisadero.’

‘OK,’ Foster said.

He put some more vodka in his mouth.

‘Ah, do you kids have any money left? I’m flat.’

I gave Foster a couple of dollars that I had left and he went to the store.

Vida put a record on the phonograph. It was the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul . I had never heard the Beatles before. That’s how long I was in the library.

‘I want you to hear this one first,’ Vida said.

We sat there quietly listening to the record.

‘Who sang that?’ I said.

‘John Lennon,’ she said.

Foster came back with the food and started cooking our dinnerbreakfast thing. Soon the whole attic was filled with the smell of onions.

That was months ago.

It’s now the last of May and we’re all living together in a little house in Berkeley. It has a small back yard. Vida’s working at a topless place over in North Beach, so she’ll have some money to go back to school next fall. She’s going to give English another try. Foster has a girlfriend who is an exchange student from Pakistan. She’s twenty and majoring in sociology.

She’s in the other room now cooking up a big Pakistani dinner and Foster is watching her with a can of beer in his hand. He’s got a job at Bethlehem Steel over in San Francisco at night working on an aircraft carrier that’s in dry dock being fixed. Today is Foster’s day off.

Vida is off doing something or other and will be home soon. She doesn’t work tonight either. I’ve spent the afternoon at a table across from Sproul Hall where they took all those hundreds of Free Speech kids off to jail in 1964. I’ve been gathering contributions for The American Forever, Etc.

I like to set my table up around lunch time near the fountain, so I can see the students when they come pouring through Sather Gate like the petals of a thousand-coloured flower. I love the joy of their intellectual perfume and the political rallies they hold at noon on the steps of Sproul Hall.

It’s nice near the fountain with green trees all around and bricks and people that need me. There are even a lot of dogs that hang around the plaza. They are of all shapes and colours. I think it’s important that you find things like this at the University of California.

Vida was right when she said that I would be a hero in Berkeley.