“My goodness, you’re in bed early,” Jim said.
“Oh, Jim,” she said. “Please come home. I’m no good alone.”
She told him about the incident and tried to explain why he had to come home and help her, but everything she said sounded silly and Jim was not at all sympathetic.
“But that’s so minor,” he said. “It’s bound to happen to every mother. You wouldn’t have been any less scared if I had been there.”
“Yes, I would,” she said and began to cry. It embarrassed her and annoyed him. He was silent until she stopped.
“That’s about three bucks’ worth of tears,” he said.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “I can’t. I’m lonely. I never said I was the independent type. I just don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Come on, now,” he said. “That’s silly. Take a painting class or something. It’s absurd for me to come home and do nothing when I’m making seven hundred dollars a week. Juanita will be there. It doesn’t make sense for me to quit. We can’t just act from whimsey.”
Patsy felt choked. She didn’t know what to say. He was absolutely right—it was all minor. But everything he said felt wrong.
“Don’t you love me?” she asked, hating herself for fishing.
“Sure,” he said. “Of course I do. But that has nothing to do with it.” And he went on to tell her about his work. It was fun and he sounded in fine fettle. Boots and Pete were coming in a week. Pete was going to be in a clown sequence.
Patsy calmed down a little, listening. She was hoping he would ask her to come up. She waited, trying to chatter naturally, but Jim hung up without inviting her, or even hinting at it. When she hung up her receiver she felt dry of tears, so flat with loneliness and disappointment that she didn’t know what to do. She lay blankly until sleep came. And when she awoke she felt just as blank and flat. It was one of the few mornings in her life that seemed utterly not worth getting up for, though it was bright and sunny in the room. She started to call Jim and ask if they could come, but she looked at the phone awhile and didn’t. He would be on the set, anyway. She looked straight up at the ceiling and listened to Davey wail for her for a full ten minutes before she found the spirit to get up and change him and take him to the rocking chair to give him the breast.
2
HER STATE OF SPIRITLESSNESS lasted all that day. She didn’t go out until the evening, and then instead of wheeling Davey to the Hortons’, she wheeled him to Rice. In the empty quadrangle there was a rabbit nibbling at one of the hedges. Patsy tried to point him out to Davey but had no luck. Except for a graduate student or two strolling along with their girls, the campus was empty. The twilight and the heavy silent buildings soothed her a little.
Jim didn’t call that night and the next morning she awoke feeling agitated. She toyed with the idea of calling him, but Juanita came in while she was brooding and her spirits shot up. She flung off her robe and got dressed, thinking it would be a great day for random shopping. She called Emma, but Emma had just burned her hand on some grease and didn’t want to go.
She went downtown alone and spent sixty dollars on two dresses for herself and some baby clothes for Davey. She watched half of Youngblood Hawke because she happened to be passing the theater and felt like seeing a movie. When she came out of the chill darkness the heat off the baking pavement was so great it almost made her faint. She made it to the Ford and drove to her drugstore for a milkshake and a grilled cheese sandwich before going home. Reading seemed feasible again, so she idled at the paperback rack while her sandwich was grilling. A fat historical romance called Angelique, with a stunning blonde on the cover, tempted her—a silly romance might get her through the evening. Then she noticed an unobtrusive paperback called The Marriage Art and on impulse took it to the counter with her. It proved to be mostly about sex and she turned through it as she ate, slightly repelled and yet slightly fascinated. There was a chapter on what the author considered more or less advanced variations; the one at which she paused the longest was a technique which required the female to place an icebag at the base of her partner’s scrotum a moment or two prior to orgasm. It was, the author advised, not for amateurs. Patsy sipped her milkshake thoughtfully, trying to imagine herself lying down to make love equipped with an icebag. It did not seem likely she would ever be that advanced about it all.
As she was brooding about The Marriage Art an arm brushed her shoulder and she looked up into the face of William Duffin. He had quietly taken the seat beside her and was smiling and reading about the icebag variation, across her bosom almost.
“Hi,” he said. “Just browsing, or do you go in for that sort of thing?”
Patsy blushed and closed the book. She was very embarrassed. Later it occurred to her that at that moment she felt very much the way Peewee must have felt when she caught him reading Sexus.
“Why did you have to sit down there?” she said irritably. She wanted to move over two or three seats but didn’t.
“You’re blushing,” he said. “My goodness. It looks like a fascinating book. Loan it to me when you finish it. A double cheeseburger please, and coffee.” He was in tennis clothes and his long angular face was sweaty.
Patsy nibbled at her sandwich. She could not go on reading the book and she didn’t particularly want to make conversation, but she was determined not to let him rattle her. All the same, she felt very stiff.
“Want a job?” he asked.
“From you?”
“Sure. My Pound book is done and I need somebody to help me with the index. I have a flunky but I’m not sure he knows the alphabet. Anyway you’re much lovelier than he is.”
Patsy looked at him a moment to see if there was anything at all in his face that she liked. He was opening a bag of potato chips. He had very long fingers and deep curved lines around his mouth. He looked sweaty and melancholy and a little more human than he ordinarily seemed. She didn’t feel sympathetic toward him, but neither did she feel actively antagonistic.
“Your wife is very nice,” she said. “Let her help you.”
“Lee is nice,” he said. “Maybe I should buy her an icebag.”
“Now really,” Patsy said. “Quit talking like that. Act your age. I’m trying my best to like you.”
“You haven’t been my age,” he said. “I am acting it. I’m a fifty-two-year-old snob and you’re a delicious-looking young woman in her twenties. It’s only natural I should scheme about you.”
Patsy was disconcerted, but not by what he said. Eddie Lou had just scowled fiercely at her from the grill. To Eddie Lou she was clearly the Madame Bovary of South Boulevard, and Eddie Lou scared her worse than Bill Duffin. She had a feeling she could hold him at bay with her wit.
“Okay,” she said, “so you have desires. By the age of fifty-two you ought to have acquired perspective, right? After all, you have a reputation, a wife and daughters, and all that.”
Bill laughed, “Don’t be so pompous,” he said. “Do you say things like that in bed? No wonder Jim left. Perspective has nothing to do with it. Life isn’t a critical essay, you know. As it happens, I lead a fairly dull life—more or less true to my wife, more or less good to my daughters. What it lacks is variety, and the older I get the more I realize what a truly marvelous thing variety is. There are all sorts of people and all sorts of experiences to be had with them. What did I have to lose by asking you outside that night at our party? Nothing. Only the bold deserve the fair. You might have been drunk enough to take me on. Don’t you ever have the impulse to take some big chance with a stranger, just to see if something interesting might happen?”
“No,” Patsy said. “Is that your philosophy of seduction?”
“I guess,” Bill said. “I don’t suppose you play tennis, either?”
“No,” Patsy said, getting up. She had begun to feel nervous again.
“Too bad. Say hello to Jim next time you hear from him. I’d be glad to pay for your milkshake.”
“No, than
ks.” She stood nervously, The Marriage Art concealed by her purse, waiting for Eddie Lou to come and take her money. Finally Eddie Lou did, and she bought some cold cream and went to the park. She sat at a picnic table, in a grump, grimly reading The Marriage Art. Bill Duffin seemed so clear about his motives and his principles that in contrast she felt doubly confused. He had also managed to make her cowardly and inhibited and various other things she didn’t like to feel. She read on, determined to read about everything that could be done with the human genitals, even if she never wanted to do any of the things herself. It was hot in the park and ants kept crawling on her ankles.
Jim called that night just as she was about to bathe. She found that she was very annoyed with him for being so far away and sounding so blithe and cheerful about it, but she was determined to be as cheerful as he was and not put herself in the humiliating position of having to admit how much she needed him.
“I saw your mentor today,” she said. “Apparently he plays tennis. He still wants to ravish me.”
“That’s silly,” Jim said. “You’re always imagining yourself getting ravished. Probably due to growing up in the South.”
“I grew up in Dallas. So did you. Do you never imagine getting ravished?”
“No.”
“You don’t have much imagination. I read a sex book today. Like me to hold an icebag against your scrotum sometime? It’s supposed to be quite a thrill.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You’d never do that. How’s Davey?”
Just before he hung up he told her that he loved her; he said it a little stiffly, as if he had been waiting for a place to slip the statement in. She told him good night and marched in to bathe, determined not to grow low-spirited. Later, after her bath, she sat at her dressing table. Her bosom was okay but it seemed to her that her thighs were growing flabby. After all, she was getting older. It was twenty minutes until midnight. She turned on the Tonight show but nobody good was on and she went back to the dressing table and began to brush her hair. She felt petulant. Having Davey hadn’t affected her figure much, but still, with age coming on, it might be a good idea if she prodded Emma into exercising with her, or something. It was depressing to think of drifting into her thirties, unappreciated, alone, and with flabby thighs. Lee Duffin probably played tennis—she gave no indication of flab. Trimness wasn’t happiness, but it might be some consolation. She stood up. It seemed to her that her hips were too broad. She might spread. Still, Duffin had obviously thought she looked okay; delicious had been his word. If so, it was a little sad, for nobody was getting much of a taste of her except her son, who was asleep. She went over and stood smoothing the fine hairs on his head with one finger as he slept. Then she yawned and went to her bed and picked up the phone. She dialed Jim at his motel in Amarillo. He answered in a very sleepy voice.
“It’s me,” she said. I’m lonesome and I don’t understand. I was a spritely girl once and now I’m a matron and I’m going to get dowdier year by year. I know I am. Why aren’t you here enjoying me while I still have my looks? You’re not supposed to go off like that until I’m in my forties and faded and fat.”
“For god’s sake,” he said. “You’re the vainest person I know.”
“I am not,” she said categorically.
“I’d like to know who is, then. Waking me up just because you’ve decided your looks are fading. I’ll be home in a month. Will you fade in a month?”
“Probably. They go quick once they start going.”
“I’m going back to sleep. I wish you weren’t so vain.”
“You want us to come and see you?”
“No.” There was a silence. “Not while you’re in your present mood. I’m working very hard and I don’t have time to cater to your vanity.”
Patsy took it coolly. She felt she was getting what she deserved. “Okay,” she said. “It was nice to argue with you again. The only time I feel married any more is when we argue.”
But after she hung up she found that her last sentence hadn’t been true. They had argued and Jim had been entirely in the right, but she didn’t feel married and she didn’t feel chastened, either. She felt clear, dry, undepressed, restless, and a little hungry; and she went to the icebox and got a stem of grapes and some icewater and dug around in a pile of library books until she found William Duffin’s book on Beckett. She found that she was curious about the Duffins—how they had got as they were—and it occurred to her that Bill’s scholarship might provide a clue. The book was dedicated to Lee, with love. She wondered what, in their life, that word meant. It had certainly not come to mean anything very definite in her own. Bill’s prose was confident and heavy and a little portentous, like his voice. She hadn’t read much Beckett and hadn’t much liked what she had read, and the faces of Lee and Bill kept clouding the page. To Lee, with love—it was disquieting. Was it possible that despite the malice and bitterness of their conversations they still did care for each other? Did they sometimes have tender moments, still? She would have liked to see through the pages into their lives for an hour. It might tell her what to hope for. But the book didn’t tell her what she wanted to know, and she grew annoyed with it and with herself. Jim was right: she was vain, weak, without character, full of vapors and gloomy speculations. She snooped in the book for thirty minutes as she might snoop in a drawer, hoping that somewhere, at the end of a chapter or the top of a page, she might find some clue to Bill and Lee, some small leakage of personality that would help her understand how very intelligent middle-aged people really were in their married lives. But all she found were insights about Endgame, and she yawned and switched off her bed light. She was sleepy and it was a comfort—small, but genuine—to know that she had six whole hours to sleep before Davey would wake up and want his mother.
The Duffins at that moment were sitting with both bed lights on. The bed was rumpled and they were drinking coffee that Lee had just made. Lee had been crying but was dry-eyed again. She gathered up several sodden Kleenex and pitched them in a wastebasket. They had just had a harrowing telephone fight with their oldest daughter, Melissa, who was in California. She had dropped out of Mills and was thinking of going off to Big Sur to live with a young man who was a nudist. He had been in a public wade-in, apparently. Lee had not particularly liked that, but Bill had not at all liked the idea of her dropping out.
“You’re going to stay in college if I have to chain you to a desk,” he said. “If you don’t like Mills you can go to Stanford next year. Or anywhere, almost.”
“It’s college I don’t like,” Melissa said. “It just doesn’t interest me. Why spend a lot of money on something that doesn’t interest me?”
They tried to be patient, but nothing they said seemed to have any effect on Melissa, and finally they both lost their patience and began to yell at her and she lost hers and yelled back. “You two don’t know anything about me,” she said. “Quit trying to force your life style on me. I don’t like alcohol and books and dull people.”
“What have you got that’s better?” Bill said. “Pot and dull films and moronic nudists?”
“He’s not moronic! You haven’t even met him! He’s smart. He’s just very essential!”
“I hope he’s not too essential to let you take pills. I don’t want you off at Big Sur having a daisy child, or whatever they call babies in the love generation.”
“They call them babies.”
“Babies, then. Where’s your intelligence gone?”
“It’s not gone! You and your mother just emphasize all the wrong things.”
“Shut up,” Bill said. “If you quit school then you can pay your bills with your own superior emphasis from now on. I won’t pay them.”
Melissa hung up, crying, and Lee cried and Bill sulked. “One gone, two to go, I guess,” he said. “What are you crying about?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “I don’t think she thinks we’re good parents. Even if we weren’t I thought we had our children fooled. I
just hate to see her quit school. She’s so bright.”
“At least she was bright,” he said. “Education apparently isn’t where it is any more. It’s probably a handicap. If one is going to live with an essential nudist I can see where it would be. What happened to the anthropology professor she was going with?”
“I guess he lost out. I think he may have been married, anyway.”
“Hard for anyone articulate to compete with essential nakedness,” Bill said. “The nudist probably screws better.”
Lee put her coffee cup on the floor and lay down on her stomach. “I don’t want to get ten years older,” she said. “I’d be no sort of grandmother. I don’t want to go on getting older day by day until I look like a prune. All my daughters will think me an absolute anachronism in another five years. I won’t have a chance.”
“What do you mean, chance?” He looked at her with curiosity.
“As a woman. What will I do? You won’t want me twice a year, probably. The girls will be off with their men. I won’t be able to do any of the things that make me happy.”
“Well, who will?” he said.
“You will. You’ll have your reputation and your students and your books.”
“Robert Frost has a poem about what you’re talking about,” he said. “It’s called ‘Provide, Provide.’”
“I read it. I waited too late to provide.”
He reached over and stroked her back, but she didn’t change expression. “So what’s your solution?” he asked.
“No solution. I’m going to sleep.”
“Patsy Carpenter really hates my guts,” he said. “I was at the drugstore today and caught her reading a marriage manual.”
“I’m glad she doesn’t like you.”
Bill switched off his light and lay in the darkness. “Melissa has a nudist and you have five or six years,” he said. “My, my.”
“What do you have?”
Moving On Page 48
