Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “You’re the world’s last optimist,” he said, switching the TV to the late show, which was a Maria Montez movie called Tangier.

  “They don’t seem any worse than any other middle-aged couple,” Emma said. “At least they’re both smart. I thought you were glad Rice was finally getting someone like him. It was all you talked about for months.”

  “I didn’t foresee him being a prick,” Flap said. He went and got himself a beer and sat down on the couch by Emma, taking off his tie.

  “Want to watch the movie or Johnny Carson?”

  “Oh, the movie awhile, I guess. Let me have a sip of beer.”

  “I think Mrs. Duffin’s getting worried she’s too old, or something,” Emma said. “She’s a little tight under all that poise. I guess having a handsome husband who teaches young darlings all day would be worrisome when you got to her age. I’ll probably be that way when you’re a famous professor and I’m forty. Only she’s thin and I’II be fat.”

  “He’s not so handsome,” Flap said.

  “I thought he was.”

  “Anyway, he doesn’t teach many girls. He mostly teaches hung-up graduate types like me and Jim.”

  “I thought you said he was good.”

  “He is good. I just don’t trust him.”

  “You’re paranoid. I like the movie better.”

  Flap got up and switched back and went and got another beer. His depression was lifting a little.

  “He’s the type who’ll make trouble just for the hell of it,” he said. “I saw him follow Patsy out to the kitchen. Next thing you know he’ll be trying to screw her.”

  “Well, so what?” Emma said, rumpling his hair jovially. “Everybody tries to screw Patsy. I don’t think you have any room to talk.”

  Flap grinned sheepishly. “Do you have to preface every remark you make with ‘Well’?” he asked.

  “No,” Emma said. “That was the first remark I’d prefaced with ‘well’ all evening. Don’t evade my accusation.”

  “I can’t help it if I’m a flirt,” Flap said.

  Emma yawned again. “It’s a good thing she doesn’t take you seriously,” she said. “She won’t take William Duffin seriously, either. Let’s have Hank over for dinner this weekend. Now there’s a guy I could take seriously, if the chance arose.”

  “Okay,” Flap said, yawning too. Emma was lying rather spraddled out on their old green couch. Flap glanced up her gown and saw the crotch of her white panties. Idly he lifted one of her legs across his lap and began to rub her with one hand. “Want to ask Jim and Patsy too?” he asked.

  “I guess,” Emma said, closing her eyes. She opened her legs even further, to facilitate being rubbed. On the screen Sabu was serenading Maria Montez, who was about to lose her heart to a hard-bitten newspaperman.

  “Maybe Duffin won’t bother me,” Flap said. “I’m not in his century. Why would he bother a nineteenth-century man?”

  “I admit the Rolling Stones were an affectation,” Emma said.

  “I’ve seen this movie. The villain gets killed in the elevator. He’s a Nazi war criminal.”

  They heard a cough and both were silent. “Teddy,” Emma said. “That sitter covers them up too much. She always has. It’s a bad Southern habit, smothering kids.” They listened, but he coughed only a couple of times and was silent. They relaxed again and Flap continued his stroking.

  “Do that some more,” Emma said, settling her hips a little. Flap did it for a while and then abruptly got aroused. “Hey, want the TV off?” he asked, standing up.

  “It doesn’t matter, I’m not watching it,” Emma said, pulling up her robe and gown. When Flap got eager, he got very eager, and there was no such thing as getting it home too quickly. He took just time enough to drop his pants and switch off the light by the couch. The glow from the TV screen lit Emma’s large hips and her loins, but Flap was not one to sit and look. He liked the way she smelled behind the ears, and the way her throat smelled. They soon grew very hot, for Flap still had his sports coat on and Emma her gown and robe. Her face was pink and sweating. Neither of them cared. When Flap came, Emma raised her legs and reached under him with one hand so she could hold his balls against her—it was a thing she really liked to do. Flap gave her a few soft little socks and, as always, was surprised, even worried, by the sound she made when she came. He knew it was only pleasure breaking through, but it was so like a sob that until her quietening grateful sighs followed it he was afraid to lift his face from her hair, fearful that he had goofed or hurt her somehow. They went almost to sleep, Flap comfortable between her ample thighs, and were brought back to themselves by a Dodge commercial. Besides being very rumpled, they were confronted with their usual problem: no Kleenex in reach and a fair amount of sperm ready to dribble out on the couch—an object which had already received an embarrassing number of dribblings.

  “Well, hell,” Flap said. “Here we are again. I can’t reach my handkerchief without coming out.”

  “You don’t have a handkerchief, anyway,” Emma said, feeling around behind her head with one hand, hoping to find something useful on the radio table by the couch.

  “Why don’t we ever manage to get to bed?” she wondered, sighing.

  “The fault of television. Find anything?”

  “No. Go on. Who cares?” He went. “Eech,” she said, covering herself with one hand. She went to the bathroom and Flap sat on the couch and took his shoes off. His left sock had a hole in the toe. Teddy began to cough again, and Emma came back in, in just her gown, with a washrag. She did what she could for the couch.

  “Want some coffee?” she asked.

  “No. I want another beer. My sock’s got a hole in the toe.”

  “If you’d cut your toenails once in a while they wouldn’t cut holes in your socks.”

  “You never remind me,” he said.

  Emma brought him a beer and made some coffee for herself. She got her sewing box and sewed up the hole in his sock. “I’ll forget it and it will get too big if I don’t do it right now,” she said. They watched what was left of the late show and listened to Teddy’s intermittent coughing. “If he’s got fever in the morning we’re canning that sitter,” Emma said, yawning more broadly. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “I want to see the elevator crash,” Flap said. “Go on to bed if you want to. I ought to read some eighteenth century, anyway.”

  Emma got out of the chair and came over and sat by him. She ruffled his hair again, yawning. Preston Foster was the Nazi. “I guess I’ll wait for you,” she said.

  6

  “I DON’T BELIEVE IT,” Patsy said. “You couldn’t be that stupid.” She was staring at Jim, injury in her face, and he sat at the kitchen table holding a book in his hands as if to protect it from her.

  “There was nothing stupid about it. I asked Duffin and he said it was a good buy and a good book to start with,”

  “To start what with?”

  “A collection of the Beats.”

  “Oh, shit,” Patsy said and began to weep. She put her face on her fists and tears ran down her wrists and arms and off the crease of her elbows onto the blue tableloth. Jim watched bitterly.

  “What are you crying about?” he said. “So I bought some expensive books. Why not? I’ve got the money. Why shouldn’t I spend it?”

  “We haven’t even paid the doctor for the baby,” she said, sniffing. “We sweltered all fall without an air conditioner. You don’t even want me to buy new dresses. We don’t even go out and eat. We don’t even go to the movies. And you spend forty dollars on a book we’ve already got, just to please William Duffin.”

  The book was a first edition of Howl, a copy that had belonged to a friend of Ginsberg’s, for whom he had written in the words that had been censored out of the original text. Jim had bought it from the catalogue of a book dealer in Florida and had patiently explained to Patsy what an important, unique copy it was; but the minute she had heard the price she became furious.

  “I
don’t care what edition it is,” she said. “Why should you squander forty dollars just to get the word f-u-c-k written a time or two in Allen Ginsberg’s hand? I could have written it in our old copy for nothing.”

  “You won’t even say it,” Jim said. “Fat chance you’d write it.”

  “You shut up,” she said, slinging tears off her face.

  There was a neat pile of books on the table, a hundred and forty dollars’ worth in all, and when she slung the tears Jim reached over and moved the books. Patsy looked at him contemptuously.

  “Maybe I’ve forgotten what the word means,” she said. “We haven’t done it in months. Even if I am pregnant I don’t think I’m that ugly. You just don’t like to touch me any more.”

  Jim was a little jolted. “It hasn’t been that long,” he said. “You always exaggerate. I don’t think it’s been that long. Anyway, your being pregnant has nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh, I don’t care how long it’s been,” she said. “It would just be nice if you wanted me once in a while. I don’t know. It’s that bastard Duffin.”

  “He’s not a bastard and he has nothing to do with it.”

  Patsy snorted and went and got a dishtowel with which to dry her eyes. “It’s him,” she said bitterly. “You’ve got to be somebody’s disciple, don’t you? I wish I could understand why you invariably pick bastards.”

  Jim put the copy of Howl on the pile of books. Patsy was staring dully out the window. A couple of late tears had leaked out of her eyes and were caught beside her nose. It was Saturday afternoon, darkening and wintry.

  “I don’t want to argue about him,” Jim said. “We’ve argued that a dozen times already. I don’t know why he adopted me but he did and that’s that. You’re not realistic. He hasn’t done anything but help me so far. You’re more paranoid than Flap.”

  “Flap and I can tell a bastard when we see one,” she said. “That’s not paranoia, that’s just good sense.”

  “It is not good sense,” Jim insisted. “I’m going to be a scholar, right? Duffin is a famous scholar. If I work under him and do well he can help me get a good job. I’ve got to work under somebody—why not him? Anyway, I’d rather read moderns than anything else. You’re just being irrational.”

  “I know it,” she said, more quietly. He could always convince her she was being irrational if he tried.

  “Maybe he’s not so bad,” she added. “I don’t know. It doesn’t strike me as particularly rational to spend forty dollars for a book you already have. A hundred and forty dollars for how many books? Nine? My god.”

  “Okay,” Jim said. “Please hush.”

  They both hushed and sat silent, brooding. Patsy scratched her hair, which needed washing. Saturday afternoons depressed her, and they had nothing at all doing for the weekend. In a moment Jim came over and tried to make her stand up so he could hug her. She did, finally, but she was stiff in his arms.

  “I’m not rational about money,” he said. “I’ve admitted it before. I tell you what, I’ll change. We’ll spend all the money we want to. There’s no point in pretending I don’t have it when I do. We could even buy a house if you still want to.”

  Patsy kept silent, but she softened enough to rub her nose against his shirt. Her nose itched. It was a breakthrough, in a way. He had never offered to try and change before. Yet something in her was still disquieted and unappeased, and she didn’t raise her face to him.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have bought air conditioners. I just feel strange about being rich when the Hortons are so poor. Flap’s my best friend.”

  “They could eat for two weeks on what that Ginsberg book cost,” Patsy said, but not angrily. It was a problem she could understand, for she had often gone shopping with Emma and felt so guilty that she had not bought things she really wanted. Usually she snuck back and bought them later. It was particularly wrenching to watch Emma shop, because Emma loved things, objects, clothes, furniture, and had good taste and was always finding things she yearned for and couldn’t buy. What made it even more wrenching was that Emma’s mother had money and never gave Emma any.

  “You’re just afraid it will be like my dictionaries and my cameras,” he said. “Just a new hobby. What if it is? It’s nothing to get upset about. The books will get more valuable as time goes on. They’re a kind of investment.”

  “You don’t give a damn about investments,” Patsy said. “You could buy municipal bonds if you wanted to invest. It’s just a way of impressing William Duffin and showing him you want to be like him. I hate him. I don’t want you to be like him. I like you because you’re not like him.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jim said. “I’m not going to argue about it.”

  “I wish you didn’t have your money, anyway,” Patsy said. “I wish the Hortons had half of it, or something. I would like for Emma to have new dresses. She doesn’t fix herself up very well.”

  “Well, we can’t do anything about the Hortons,” Jim said. “What would you really like to do? We’ll do it right now.”

  Patsy thought he meant make love, and she didn’t want to, not just because her tears had made him contrite. But when she looked up at him she saw that he meant something else.

  “I mean like go out or something,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, let’s do. Maybe we could go to Galveston. We haven’t been in months.” She brightened at once, and the tense look left her face.

  Half an hour later they were in the Ford, slipping onto the Gulf freeway. Patsy was curled against her door, wearing jeans, a sweater, and an old trench coat of Jim’s. The warm car and the straight even highway calmed and almost mesmerized them both. As they sped out of Houston across the flat coastal plain, Patsy realized how much she had missed driving since the summer. In four months and more they had not been out of the city of Houston. All fall Jim had read at home at night or gone to the library, and she had read at home or gone to the library with him, the only break in the routine being an occasional hour or two of beer drinking with the other graduate students. She had even begun to avoid the beer drinkings, not because she didn’t enjoy them but because she had discovered in herself a latent competitiveness in regard to Jim that was rather awful. The talk was always of books, and she had read many books and had a good memory for them, much better than Jim’s. All too frequently she was unable to resist showing off how bright she was. It discomfited Jim, but the other graduate students appreciated her memory and her wit and she couldn’t help responding to their appreciation. When the conversations got lively she became almost demonically inspired and could remember quotations and incidents in novels and bits of biographical minutiae that impressed the other graduate students mightily. Jim grew moody and told her from time to time that she ought to be getting the Ph.D., not him. Sometimes his moodiness merely made her worse. She became quite unable to shut up, and it was only later, remembering the conversations, that she found her aggressiveness distasteful. When she watched Jim study, saw him methodically reading scholarly books in order to get their theses clear, she would feel ashamed of herself and resolve to try and be a help rather than a discouragement, but the next time there was a literary conversation she invariably forgot her resolve. Flap Horton sometimes grew irritated with her, particularly when she came up with some oddment of information that spoiled his own theory on a given author or book. He told her she was a brilliant amateur, but essentially belle-lettristic, and she told him she considered that more of a compliment than a put-down.

  The real trouble was that Jim was an amateur too, and a cautious one. He had been at work for three weeks on a paper on The House of Fame and was still far from satisfied with it.

  It was a relief to be going somewhere where there were no graduate students. For once there would be no talk of books. There was nothing to see beside the flat road except an occasional filling station and, in the distance, the wavering orange flares from the giant oil refineries that lay along the ship channel. She looked at J
im, who was in a brood of his own. He had had his hair cut that afternoon, irritatingly short, she felt. It made him look too boyish. It seemed to her that the two of them had been living together almost all their lives, and that consequently it was time Jim stopped looking so much like a boy. She was growing heavier, her breasts were larger, she was changing, but when she looked for some development in him to match the development in her she could see none. The fact that they would soon have a baby left him unchanged, and almost unaffected. It worried her deeply. She wanted to feel that she could depend upon him taking care of her when the baby came, and she couldn’t feel it. He had gone away, further away than he had ever gone before—into the library, into the coffee conversations of graduate school, into a world that didn’t involve her at all, and she had no confidence in her ability to draw him back. His face was not happy—she had a feeling he would really rather be reading articles on The House of Fame. The drive to Galveston was just a duty, something he was doing to be courteous.

  They crossed the high bridge over the coastal waterway and curved down onto Galveston island, drove up Broadway, passed the cemetery where the victims of the great flood were buried, and on past the few blocks of old turreted many-porched houses, virtually all that was left to suggest the Galveston of the past. Imperious dowager aunts should live in such houses, Patsy thought, though she had never been quite sure what made a dowager aunt. When they came to the ocean Jim turned right and they drove along the sea wall, passing the hotels, the arcades, the pier pavilion, and the seafood houses. They went on a mile or more south, past the old military embarkments, and parked and got out.

  The gusty salty wind immediately blew Patsy’s hair into her face. The tide was in and flecks of spray hit them. They looped arms and silently walked along the sea wall, the gusting wind causing them to weave a little. They walked far on, until they came to the last of the sea-wall lights. It was very foggy. They heard a ship’s horn from the dark Gulf. The patterns of white foam and dark water repeated themselves and repeated themselves as they walked. They stood at the last light on the sea wall a minute or more, reluctant to go back; but the foggy darkness beyond the light seemed uninviting and they turned. “Hart Crane’s washing around out there,” Jim said. William Duffin had got him interested in Crane.