Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  Praise for Larry McMurtry and Moving On

  “A Texas-sized book . . . Mr. McMurtry is blessed with an absolutely solid sense of place. His backgrounds and scenic descriptions are inherent parts of his story, contributing as much to the novel as does the completely natural dialogue.”

  —Saturday Review

  “A marvelous book, funny, tough, filled with sensual good nature and nerviness.”

  —Herbert Gold

  “Moving On is filled with memorable cameos.… McMurtry writes with intellect, compassion, and considerable skill.”

  —Library Journal

  “McMurtry can transform ordinary words into highly lyrical, poetic passages.… He presents human drama with a sympathy and compassion that make us care about his characters in a way that most novelists can’t.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Larry McMurtry is among the most imaginative writers working today.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  By Larry McMurtry

  Telegraph Days

  Oh What a Slaughter

  The Colonel and Little Missie

  Loop Group

  Folly and Glory

  By Sorrows River

  The Wandering Hill

  Sin Killer

  Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West

  Paradise

  Boone’s Lick

  Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways

  Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond

  Duane’s Depressed

  Comanche Moon

  Dead Man’s Walk

  The Late Child

  Streets of Laredo

  The Evening Star

  Buffalo Girls

  Some Can Whistle

  Anything for Billy

  Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

  Texasville

  Lonesome Dove

  The Desert Rose

  Cadillac Jack

  Somebody’s Darling

  Terms of Endearment

  All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

  Moving On

  The Last Picture Show

  In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

  Leaving Cheyenne

  Horseman, Pass By

  By Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  Zeke and Ned

  By Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx, and Diana Ossana

  Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay

  MOVING ON

  a novel by

  Larry McMurtry

  With a New Preface

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events

  or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1970 by Larry McMurtry

  Preface copyright © 1987 by Larry McMurtry

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  This Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2006

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at

  1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Touchstone edition

  as follows:

  McMurtry, Larry.

  Moving on.

  (A Touchstone Book)

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A319M6 1987

  813′.54 86-31587

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-20604-8

  ISBN-10: 0-671-20604-4

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85388-8 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-684-85388-4 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2892-3

  The verse quoted on page 7 is from “Old Showboat,”

  by Marijohn Wilkin and Fred Burch, copyright © 1962 by

  Cedarwood Publishing Co., a division of Musiplex Group, Inc.

  Used with permission.

  For the woman with whom I found

  the unemptiable Horn.

  Oh I rode into Dallas,

  Feeling kinda low;

  Thought I’d pick me up some change

  At the ro-dee-o . . .

  Preface

  THE KNOTTIEST AESTHETIC PROBLEM I fumbled with in Moving On is whether its heroine, Patsy Carpenter, cries too much.

  I might say that I had not even the haziest consciousness of this problem while I was writing the book. Then it was published, and I immediately started finding myself locked into arguments with women, all of whom resented Patsy’s tears.

  Though the women I was arguing with were often on the verge of tears themselves, and occasionally brimmed over with them, they one and all contended that no woman worthy of respect would cry so much.

  Some of these arguments flowed and ebbed for months and even years, in some cases swelling back to flood stage just when I thought they had finally ebbed for good. I gradually came to feel that the question was not so much aesthetic as political. I had inadvertently left a copiously tearful young woman exposed on a lonely beach, just as the tsunami of feminism was about to crash ashore.

  The fact that most women didn’t much like Patsy was a profound shock to me. I liked her a lot—enough to devote much of an eight-hundred-page novel to her—and I fully expected women to like her as much as I did.

  The book was written in the late sixties, and set less than a decade earlier. As arguments over Patsy’s tears persisted, I gradually came to regard it as essentially a historical novel, one which attempted to describe a way of life—mainly, the graduate school way of life—in a vanished era. The era had only vanished a few years earlier, but it was definitively gone.

  In that simpler era—as I explained to many sceptics—virtually all women had cried virtually all the time. The ones I knew were rarely dry-eyed, so it seemed to me that I was only obeying the severe tenets of realism in having Patsy sob through chapter after chapter.

  My editor, Michael Korda, was evidently one of the few people alive in the late sixties whose memory for social and domestic history was as precise as mine. He too remembered a time not so long ago when virtually all women cried virtually all the time. I believe he was as shocked as I was when half the human beings in the Western world treated the book with scorn. And it cannot have helped that the other half of the human beings—i.e., the males—ignored it completely.

  In the seventeen years since its publication, it’s fair to say that a few enclaves of enthusiasm have formed. A number of women from Arkansas have written to tell me how much they like the book, and none have complained about Patsy’s tears. It may be that in Arkansas virtually all women still cry virtually all the time, as they did throughout America in the late fifties.

  A rather puzzling thing to me, as I look through the book today, is that it contains so many rodeo scenes. Few novels, then or ever, have attempted to merge the radically incongruent worlds of graduate school and rodeo. I am now completely at a loss to explain why I wished to attempt this. Apparently I deceived myself for several years with the belief that I wanted to write something about rodeo. A publisher once went so far as to option a non-fiction book about rodeo which I
proposed to write. The option provided me with an excuse to drive around the West for seven thousand miles, but I handily avoided all the rodeos along my route.

  I grew up in the land of the rodeo, saw a great many as a youth, and cannot recall ever being particularly interested in them. Why I felt the need to graft a rodeo plot onto something I was interested in writing about—i.e., graduate school—is a mystery I don’t expect to solve, though I do know why I wanted to write about graduate school. In the late fifties, with no war on, the romance of journalism tarnished, the romance of investment banking yet to flower, graduate school was where many of the liveliest people chose to tarry while deciding what to do next.

  The same milieu caught the eye of Philip Roth, who probed its textures in Letting Go, another long novel with a participial title. No rodeo cowboys strayed into his book.

  My strongest memory of Moving On—aside from how much I liked Patsy and her dowdy friend Emma Horton—involved the struggle to title it. In almost all cases I have started with a title, and then tried to find a book I can fit to it. The title helps prepare me for the book I’m going to write; ideally it should also help prepare the reader for the book he or she is about to read.

  In this case the ideal did not prevail. I started with no more than an image of a young woman eating a Hershey bar, at evening in a car. At the time I was calling the book The Water and the Blood.

  This title soon found its way into my entry in Contemporary Authors. A college president for whom I was making a speech misread the entry and introduced me to a comatose audience as the author of a forthcoming book called The Water and the Bloop.

  No one rose to ask me what a bloop was, but I soon abandoned that title anyway.

  Then I batted out four drafts of a book called The Country of the Horn. Patsy wept like the Sabine women, and there was all the rodeo anyone could want.

  A year or so later I figured out that the book was really about marriage, rather than bull riding. The first four drafts were swept down a manhole and a long, titleless book began to evolve. Once I realized how long it was going to be I stopped trying to title it, in the belief that it would grow out from under whatever title I chose.

  I finished it in November 1969, expecting that it would be published the following fall. I planned to spend several happy weeks with poetry anthologies, seeking a glowing phrase that would resonantly describe the book I had just written.

  To my horror, Simon and Schuster informed me that they were jumping the novel to their spring list, which was weak that year in fiction dealing with graduate students who follow the rodeo circuit. Catalog copy was due in three days. I immediately read several thousand lines of Paradise Lost. I found many glowing phrases, but they had already been used to title other books. Then I ransacked such likely sources as ballad collections and hymn books, adopting and discarding dozens of titles.

  Eventually I grew numb, and suggested simply calling the book Patsy Carpenter, rattling off a few historical precedents in support of this approach. I think I mentioned Emma, Jennie Gerhardt, and Geraldine Bradshaw as fine examples of books named after their heroines. Simon and Schuster remained unimpressed.

  Finally, my editor’s then-wife suggested calling it Moving On, I was too numb either to love it or hate it, and in my numbness I conceded, foolishly, I now believe. Except for one reader in England who loved Patsy’s husband Jim—a man who would now be called a wimp—Patsy Carpenter, sobbing tirelessly, was the character everyone noticed, whether they liked her or not. I thought then and think now that her name would have done fine as a title.

  —Larry McMurtry

  August 1986

  BOOK I

  The Beginning

  of the Evening

  1

  PATSY SAT BY HERSELF at the beginning of the evening, eating a melted Hershey bar. She had been reading Catch-22 but remembered the Hershey and fished it out of the glove compartment, where it had been all day. It was too melted to be neatly handleable, so she laid the paperback on the car seat and avidly swiped the chocolate off the candy paper with two fingers. When the candy was gone, she dropped the sticky wrappers out the window and licked what was left of the chocolate off her fingers before picking up the book again.

  Sometimes she ate casually and read avidly—other times she read casually and ate avidly. Another melted Hershey would have left her content, but there wasn’t another. The glove compartment held nothing but road maps and a bottle of hand lotion, and if she walked to a concession stand and bought another Hershey it wouldn’t be melted, probably.

  And it was dusk, almost too dark to read. She had been in the grandstand, but the lights around the arena had come on too early, spoiling some of the softness of the evening, so she had come back to the Ford. Evening had always been her favorite time of day, and in Texas, in the spring, it was especially so. Dawn was said to be just as lovely, but she had seen only a few dawns and had been only half awake at most of those. It was evening that made her feel keen and fresh and hopeful.

  The Ford was parked far back from the arena in a jumble of pickups and horsetrailers, far enough away that the lights and noise of rodeo scarcely intruded on the dusk. Soon she put Catch-22 on the seat again and sat watching the sky to the west. The sun had gone down and all the lower sky was yellow. While she watched, it became orange and then red and then a fainter red, and the color lingered on the rim of the plains until the whole sky was dark.

  She wore a gray dress and was bare-armed. It had been a hot afternoon for May, and the coolness of dusk felt good on her arms. Behind her, at the near end of the bleachers, a high school band broke into the National Anthem—it meant that the Grand Entry was in progress. The arena was full of horses and riders: rodeo had come again to Merkel, Texas. There were riding clubs, kids piled on ponies, pivot men unfurling the flags of the nations, cowgirls in tight pink trousers, and nervous businessmen on palominos. The procession into the arena had been very noisy, but before the anthem ended, the sound of hoofs and the jingling of bits faded out and the grounds became so quiet that Patsy heard it when one of the young clarinetists squeaked his reed. Everyone but her was standing up and the knowledge made her fretful and a little ashamed of herself.

  The sport of rodeo did not interest Patsy at all—it interested her husband Jim. She herself had lumped it in her mind with cows, and cows did not interest her at all—not, at least, unless they were properly cooked. The fact that no cows were at hand was merely a lucky happenstance; in that part of Texas cows might appear at any moment. The only animal immediately at hand was a fat sorrel horse. He was tied to the sideboards of a nearby trailer, close enough that Patsy could smell him. Aside from one fart, he had been very polite and had gained her sympathies. Several times cowboys had walked by and slapped him on the behind to make him move over, and he had refrained from kicking them. If similarly provoked, she felt sure she would have kicked them. Occasionally the horse swished his tail against the fender of the Ford.

  In the west a few very bright stars were out, though it was still not completely dark. She felt a little restless and was considering what she might do, when another cowboy walked by, a can of beer in one hand. He slapped the horse on the rump and the horse moved over. The cowboy burped, pitched down his beer can, unbuttoned his pants, and immediately began to relieve himself against the fender of the Ford.

  “Hey,” Patsy said, very startled “Go piss on your own car!”

  She was too surprised to sound very outraged, but she was no more surprised than the cowboy. He whirled around toward the trailer, liberally watering the whole area, horse included.

  “My god, I never knowed you was there,” he said. “Why didn’t you speak up sooner?”

  “Shock prevented me,” she said faintly, for she was shocked—the more so as the first surprise wore off. She could hear him pissing.

  “Lady,” he sighed, “I would stop. I just ain’t got the brakes.”

  “Oh, hell,” she said, flustered.

  The cowb
oy was silent until he finished and had buttoned up. He stood with his back to her a moment, apparently in thought, and then confidently hitched up his pants and turned toward the car.

  “Ed Boggs,” he said. “I guess I ought to apologize.”

  “I’m Patsy Carpenter,” Patsy said, assuming that an introduction was taking place. Ed Boggs was clearly charmed. He leaned his elbows on the car door and peered in at her happily. His face was paunchy and he smelled of beer and starch and hair oil.

  “Never meant to mess up your fender,” he said, not bothering to affect remorse. “I just kinda needed somethin’ to lean on there for a minute. Been puttin’ ’em down a little too fast this evenin’. What I really want to do is ask you for a date to the dance. You look to me like you’ve got a lot on the ball.”

  “Why, thanks,” Patsy said, smiling. Her cheeks colored. She could never help smiling when complimented. “I’m married, though.”

  Mr. Boggs neither moved nor changed expression, and she assumed he had not understood.

  “I can’t go to the dance with you, I mean. I’m really married.”

  Ed Boggs was in no way discouraged. “Who ain’t?” he said amiably. “My old lady’s married too. How about me gettin’ in and sittin’ down with you a minute to catch my breath?”

  Patsy wanted very much to scoot toward the opposite door. Sitting beneath Mr. Boggs’s face was like sitting beneath a heavy, badly balanced wooden object. He reached for the door handle, as if he were sure she wouldn’t mind his getting in, but Patsy had locked the door and he didn’t quite have the nerve to unlock it.

  “No, you can’t get in,” she said. “You’re being a little rude. I was about to take a nap. Why don’t you go off and fill your bladder again?”

  Her admirer attempted to take the rebuff in stride, but it was clearly not the sort of thing he was used to hearing from the lips of a woman. His paunches slowly shifted position and became a frown.

  “I ain’t gonna hug-dance with you if you talk to me like that,” he said, attempting to jest. “I ain’t out to rape you. I just want to sit down and rest a minute, maybe talk, you know.”