Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  She hung up and went to Hank’s, so agitated that she forgot to buy anything to make sandwiches with. Hank was not there. The apartment was dark and cool, but not chill in the way most Houston apartments were. The air conditioner was too old. It gave the air a musty smell that she had come to like. It seemed to her, in moments of fantasy, that real people, who hadn’t money, probably lived their lives amid such smells, in such apartments, and she loved to lie on the couch and imagine herself an underprivileged housewife, one with a struggling young husband—the kind of wife who never wore stockings except to faculty teas. When Hank came in she was still on the couch, an empty milk glass on the floor beside her. Her thoughts were swirling—now to Miri and a possible Negro lover, now to her mother and the night of tears that lay ahead, now to Jim and a weekend that she could not imagine.

  “I hope you’ve eaten,” she said. “I forgot to get anything.”

  His appetite was of a different nature. Patsy was dizzy with willingness. It was bliss to be presented with a desire that blew away all that had been swirling in her head. Miri, Jeanette, Jim, all blew away and were replaced by the feel and smell of skin. They made love immediately on the couch. Afterwards they found themselves unduly sweaty and garment-plagued and got up and undressed and went to bed, to rest. Patsy rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. She told him about her problems but got little response. He never thought her problems were serious. He was reading Tristram Shandy but with reluctance. She dozed, and when she awoke the air conditioner seemed to have played out completely and she was sweating. Hank was fiddling with it. Everything beyond the bed seemed tinged with unreality. It seemed to her she had at last found a way to manipulate time. She felt like she had been on the bed for weeks. If she could just stay there, more weeks might pass with nothing bad happening.

  When he sat down she stroked the smooth skin over his arm muscle. He hadn’t tried to stop her from going to Amarillo, and she was a little annoyed. “I guess you can finish Tristram Shandy while I’m gone,” she said. “It would hurt my conscience if I interfered with your studies.” But she was fishing. It wouldn’t have hurt her conscience at all. She was beginning to wonder what would. She wanted him to ask her not to go. If he had, she would have found an excuse to back out. But her hints never reached him, and finally, feeling distinctly petulant, she showered and left him to Tristram Shandy.

  Miri simply could not be reached. Patsy tried four times before her mother arrived on the doorstep, fighting tears. Patsy popped Davey into her arms, hoping to plug the dike, but it didn’t work. She had to snatch him away again and divert him as best she could from the spectacle of her mother crying herself out. It was not hard to divert him, for her mother cried quietly, like a gentlewoman.

  “But you really don’t know that anything’s wrong,” Patsy said. “You really don’t know a thing.”

  “I know,” Jeanette sobbed. “If I knew maybe I wouldn’t act this way. When I see Davey I can’t help crying.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?” Then she realized that Jeanette was envisioning him with a black cousin. Finally it was Juanita who calmed Jeanette down. She took her into the kitchen, made her some tea, and told her in her own hesitant English about the various horrors that had befallen her own daughters, in Old Mexico and South Texas. It left Jeanette feeling that her lot was only the lot of all mothers. “You have such a nice maid,” she said, after Juanita left to catch her bus. “I wonder how those people survive. Of course Daddy and I were poor once, but we didn’t have these problems then.”

  “What problems did you have then?” Patsy asked, curious.

  “You know, I don’t really remember. Garland was very anxious about money. I guess he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to provide for me. I wasn’t anxious much, I don’t think. You and Miri were both such dears as children that we never had to worry about you at all. You were both so sweet and pretty.”

  “But then we grew up,” Patsy said. “What a change that’s wrought.” She was silent, trying to imagine Davey grown up to be a man. Was it possible that the day would come when she would be sitting, tear-streaked and poorly made-up and fifty-five, making one of her daughters nervous because another of them, or Davey, had grown up and was making what to her were hideous mistakes? She jiggled her son on her lap and could imagine it, for there might be thousands of girls, of all colors, whom she would not want him to marry. She sighed and Jeanette sighed and they turned the talk to Davey, who was cheerful. He helped the afternoon pass.

  Late in the afternoon she took Davey and Jeanette next door to visit the matronly widow who lived there. While they were making a fuss over Davey she sneaked back home and managed to get Miri on the phone.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Miri said.

  “I can’t talk very long. Momma’s here, going out of her mind with worry about you. Have you got a Negro boy friend, by any chance?”

  There was a pause. “That isn’t any of her business,” Miri said hostilely.

  “I’m the one that’s asking. I don’t care—I just want to know. I’m having to fight battles for you on this end. It’s pretty tacky of you not to come home all summer. No wonder they’re worried. You can have an Eskimo boy friend, for all I care.”

  “You’re not really very different from her, though,” Miri said.

  “I am very different from her, and you know it.”

  “Well, there are lots of boys around. I don’t classify them by colors. Are you still living with Jim?”

  “I’m married to Jim,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be living with him? He’s in Amarillo making a movie right now.”

  “That’s what I thought. I think you probably need some boys around.”

  Patsy was startled. “Listen,” she said, “don’t bitch at me. You’re not all that worldly, just because you smoke marijuana. If you’ve got such good boys around why do you sound so bitchy?”

  “I’m too much for them,” Miri said. “You don’t really know me any more. You’re back there. It’s different out here. Out here it’s great.”

  “It’s too bad there are no men there who can handle you, if it’s so great,” Patsy said. “I’m going to tell Momma you don’t have a Negro boy friend, if you don’t mind.”

  “It’s a lie.”

  “I know it’s a lie, but it will make her sleep better. It doesn’t hurt to consider her a little, you know. She loves you, even if you don’t like her.”

  “Okay,” Miri said, sounding a little chastened. “I don’t want her to worry. We were going to come to Texas but our Volks broke down.”

  “You sound like you’ve had a wild freshman year. Have you been taking LSD?”

  “Sure. Have you?”

  “No. I’m too old. I guess I missed it.”

  “Out here you don’t have to miss anything.”

  “Okay, dear,” Patsy said. “Try to miss getting pregnant or busted, if you don’t mind.”

  The story she fabricated for Jeanette was so successful that she almost regretted it. All she said was that Miri was dating a law student from Stanford, but it cheered Jeanette up immediately and left her so grateful that Patsy scarcely knew what to do with her. She had meant to fly back to Dallas the next morning, but she decided to stay another day and enjoy her grandson. The morning turned out to be more trying for Patsy than the tearful afternoon had been. Once cheered, Jeanette became everything that was irritating to Patsy. She cooed too much over Davey, overpraised Patsy at every turn, and was enthusiastic at depressing length over Jim’s new career. She went on about how glad she was Patsy had made such an ideal marriage, how much Garland liked Jim, how reassuring it was to them that they were so normal and well married, how they could hardly wait for another grandchild. Patsy gritted her teeth. In desperation she took her to Emma’s, where Jeanette outdid herself in complimenting Emma on a rather dowdy dress and her generally shabby furniture. The only dark cloud on Jeanette’s day was the Ford, which struck her as unnecessarily old and
low class; she remarked four or five times how all the car dealers in Dallas were friends of Garland’s. They would, she was sure, bend over backward to give them a good deal on a new car. “No, thanks, we like this one,” Patsy said grimly.

  But the Ford was a small cross to bear. Once back home, Jeanette began to overflow with compliments—on the books that looked so interesting, the pictures that were so novel, Patsy’s new clothes, the matronly widow next door, the Whitneys’ well-kept back yard, the sandwich she was given for lunch, Patsy’s infinite skill in handling Miri, Juanita’s neatness, and the spotless state of the floors and the silverware; even the iced-tea glasses were worthy of compliment. Patsy became grim, very grim, and was extremely glad when Juanita came to draw off some of the compliments. She felt on the verge of blurting out that Miri was taking LSD and sleeping around interracially, in order to turn the compliments back to tears. In sorrow her mother seemed human, forgivable, lovable even; but when happy she seemed like someone who had been created entire by a second-rate advertising firm, someone whose chief function was to keep repeating testimonials to all products, no matter how dreary, and all approvable ideas, no matter how banal and empty. Even from the bedroom, as she was rocking Davey, she heard the drone of her mother’s compliments from the kitchen, the inflections rising and falling in a Southern rhythm, interrupted now and then by Juanita’s slow English.

  Jeanette, after a little subtle prodding, had decided to leave that evening on a six o’clock plane. It seemed to Patsy that six more hours of compliments would be unendurable, particularly since Davey would be asleep for three of them. She rocked him, her cheek against his, wishing she could rock him all afternoon, but when she put him in bed and confronted her mother again she felt dry and nervous. Jeanette wanted to talk about Miri; she felt optimistic and wanted Patsy to tell her what to do to win back Miri’s confidence. She was dutifully prepared to try anything Patsy could suggest. Her optimism depressed Patsy so deeply that she could hardly think. It seemed to her that Miri was absolutely justified in everything she did, and that she ought to go on, pushing her rebellion with integrity, taking each new drug as it came out, and sleeping with black militants or perhaps Chinese if China loving became fashionable among the young.

  The prospect of listening to Jeanette, much less advising her, suddenly became unendurable; she seized upon the flimsy excuse that she had forgotten to return a reserve book to the library and in five minutes was out the door. She knew if she didn’t move fast it would occur to Jeanette that she wanted to see Rice, and the thought of offering her mother a whole campus about which to be complimentary was too much. Once out into the hot one o’clock heat, with no voice in her ear and no grateful face across the table from her, she discovered that she felt fine. Hank was lying on his couch, reading a magazine. She came in briskly, kissed him, and saw that the magazine was Sports Illustrated.

  “Why aren’t you reading the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism?” she said. “My husband reads it.”

  “Are you sure?” He reached for her but missed. She got herself a drink of water and went briskly into the bedroom, swinging her purse.

  “He read one issue of it,” she said. “Come on. I haven’t got time for the amenities today. I had to lie to get out at all.”

  He came, but her approach took him aback slightly. He was not very sure of himself. It didn’t matter to Patsy, who had grown quite sure of herself.

  “What made you like that?” he asked as she was dressing. She felt fine, but he spoke in his sulking tone, as if he were offended that she had been aggressive. He did not realize that his statement was ambiguous.

  “You think the romance is wearing off, huh?” she asked, fastening her bra.

  “I wasn’t talking about romance,” he said.

  “You don’t talk at all,” she said. “Occasionally you venture a cryptic observation, usually inaccurate. I’m not in such an odd mood, I’m just in a hurry. I came here to be had and I was had. Thank you. I’ve stopped being a nice person and become a competent person, but there’s nothing strange about my mood particularly.”

  He tried to get her back in bed—he wanted the control back—but she was cool to him; all she would do was sit for a minute. With one finger she traced the little line of hair that ran upward from his groin.

  “You’ve got a blue spot on your leg,” Hank said, pointing it out.

  Patsy sighed. It occurred to her that his conversation was as dull as any she had ever listened to. It was odd she should be sleeping with him. “Advancing age,” she said. “You’re not the sort who’ll love me when I’m old and flabby, are you? You’ll find someone young and nubile and leave me to spend my declining years in a snowdrift or somewhere.”

  She got up and looked in the mirror to see if she looked chaste and scholarly, as befitted a girl returning from a library. “Damn it,” she said. “I look like I’ve been doing exactly what I’ve been doing. Maybe I better wear lipstick. Momma’s idea of a bohemian is someone who doesn’t. Actually I suppose if I were being had before her eyes she’d pretend it was a first-aid demonstration or something.”

  She went home and was sweet and kind and talkative, reassuring about Miri, concerned about her father’s drinking, confiding about Jim’s plans. She got Jeanette a cab, allowed Davey to be showered with last minute kisses, and stood at the curb with him, waving one of his chubby fists until the cab was out of sight. Davey thought it was absurd and so did she. Then she got his carriage and took him for a long happy walk, feeling calm and thoughtful. The world had resumed its normal course.

  10

  THE NEXT DAY the problem of Amarillo—complicated enough to begin with—became more complicated still. In the middle of the morning, as Patsy was meandering about in her gown, enjoying not having her mother there and looking for a section of the newspaper that she had managed to mislay, there was a knock at the door and in breezed Dixie, resplendent in a red and green outfit that hit her halfway up her nice plump thighs. She looked as fresh and firm as the apple Patsy had just washed for herself, and she had brought Davey a huge red, yellow, green, blue, and white truck, made out of plastic blocks that came apart. It was several months too old for him, but they put him on his blanket on a sunny spot on the rug and let him look at it. Dixie’s dress was even brighter than the blocks, so that Davey had trouble deciding where to look.

  “You look great,” Patsy said. “Where’d you get that miniskirt?”

  “Oh, a crazy shop. There were hippies around. There must be something wrong with me, you know. I kinda like hippies. I always was one for men with lots of hair. It’s too bad they’re all communists—we’ll probably have to put them in camps sooner or later. Jeanette called yesterday and told me how worried she was about Miri.”

  “I might have known she’d call you,” Patsy said.

  “Sure, you know how polite she is,” Dixie said. “It would never do for her not to call her husband’s sister, even if she can’t stand me. I didn’t care. I always liked Jeanette, anyway. Anybody who has to live with Garland deserves some sympathy.”

  Patsy giggled but felt slightly on the hook nonetheless. She knew that Dixie was not as easily fooled as her mother.

  “What’s Miri really been doing? Taking dope?”

  “Yes,” Patsy said, thinking she had better yield that point. Dixie was not rational on the subject of race.

  “You can’t expect a kid not to take dope these days,” Dixie said. “It would be like expecting me not to dance when I was that age. I just wouldn’t want her to marry a communist or anything. If she starts to do something like that maybe you and I can go out and stop her, okay?”

  “Maybe,” Patsy said, not enthralled by the prospect.

  “Just don’t let Garland and Jeanette get wind of it. If they were to try and stop her she’d marry old Khrushchev himself.”

  The thought of Miri and Nikita Khrushchev made Patsy smile.

  “Say, we can go to Amarillo together,” Dixie said. “Jeanette sa
id you were going tomorrow and I’d been meaning to go, so I called Joe and I called Sonny and made them both invite me. I called them in the middle of the night, when they were too sleepy to think of any excuse for not inviting me. You’ll need some help with all that baby stuff, anyway.”

  Patsy felt an immediate sinking feeling. She didn’t want to go to Amarillo; she wanted to stay where she was and do exactly what she was doing. She had been planing to call that morning and tell Jim that Davey had a minor illness and that they wouldn’t be coming. But she had been too sleepy and had neglected to call. Dixie’s words made her feel trapped. Dixie would certainly go, and there was Davey at her feet, healthy as a baby could be. She would have had no excuse except the truth, and she was not about to tell Dixie the truth. She couldn’t keep a confidence any longer than she could keep a hundred-dollar bill.

  Dixie noticed that her niece looked unhappy, but attributed it to a natural reluctance to see her husband. “Perk up,” she said. “You’re looking great these days. Maybe there’ll be some fun movie stars around. I’ll call and make us reservations.”

  Patsy’s hopes rose for a moment. It was possible all the planes would be full. But the reverse was true—they were all empty. Crowds were not flocking to Amarillo. Dixie breezed out as cheerfully as she had breezed in, leaving Patsy very down. A promising day had been spoiled, not to mention a promising weekend.

  Her spirits spiraled slowly downward, and by the time she reached Hank’s that afternoon she felt hopeless. Her marriage was probably ruined, and no doubt her romance soon would be. It was exactly what she deserved, but, deserving of ruin as she felt, she could not help wishing it hadn’t come so soon.

  She might have stayed hopeless all afternoon had not Hank made her angry. “Well, it’s not such a tragedy,” he said when she told him why she was low.