Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  Kenny Cambridge took offense at her remark. “It ticks me off,” he said. “Here we are, the smartest people around, and nobody wants to talk about literature.”

  “Why should we talk about literature?” Flap asked. No one had an answer.

  “I’d rather have an orgy,” the stocky girl said, startling everyone.

  “I vote against it,” Lee said mildly.

  “Me too,” Patsy said. “There’s nothing I’d rather not see than all of you naked.”

  To everyone’s dismay, Peter asked Kenny to read some of his poems aloud. Everyone else had been grimly determined never to ask Kenny to read. Kenny went to an old scratched-up desk and opened a drawer, and a huge cockroach ran out and across the desk.

  “Shit,” Kenny said. “A cockroach was in my poems.”

  “Maybe it was Kafka,” Emma said. She looked like she was getting sleepy.

  Kenny hastily read a poem. There was silence. “You’re all too drunk to appreciate me,” he said.

  “Let’s talk about Norman Mailer,” Flap said.

  “Kenny made me read The American Dream,” the stocky girl said. “I didn’t see anything so good about it.

  “I hear he acts crazy,” she added, yawning and scratching her stomach.

  “Don’t put him down,” Kenny said angrily.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t like that story that happened in the loft,” Emma said. Her eyelids were falling.

  “Why are we talking about him?” Patsy asked. She was annoyed at Hank because he didn’t say anything. She wanted very badly for him to say something brilliant. She felt she might stop loving him if he didn’t. But he said nothing; he didn’t even seem to be listening intelligently. It worried her. She could not help wondering if he was smart, and she didn’t want to wonder such a thing.

  “We could talk about Mary McCarthy,” she said.

  “What’s there to say about her?” Flap asked.

  “She was one of Edmund Wilson’s wives,” Lee said. She was amused by it all.

  “Well, what’s so good about Edmund Wilson?” Kenny said. “It’s always Edmund Wilson this, Edmund Wilson that. Who told him he could be the boss of literature?”

  “Don’t be impertinent,” Flap said. “Edmund Wilson isn’t even on a faculty. How could he be the boss of literature? Northrop Frye’s the boss of literature at the moment. There are some regional bosses. F. R. Leavis is the boss at Cambridge. Lionel Trilling is the boss at Columbia. Yvor Winters is the boss on the West Coast.”

  “I don’t believe in anal intercourse, anyway,” Emma said drowsily.

  “Quit mumbling,” Flap said. “Nobody was talking about it. We’re talking about the administration of literature.”

  “Sorry,” Emma said. “Let Patsy talk. She never gets to express herself.”

  “This department is a collection of turds,” Kenny said sincerely.

  “They’re just a bit Galsworthian,” Flap said mildly. “I don’t mind. Why should you mind?”

  “That’s very condescending,” Emma said. “I like most of them very much.”

  “Fuck you,” Flap said. “Go on to sleep.”

  A sullen young couple nobody liked were arguing in the corner, as they had been all evening, passing marijuana back and forth to each other. “We would be just like them if we were married,” Patsy said to Hank. Her sense of doom was deepening.

  “Why don’t you stop drinking and take Emma home,” Patsy said to Flap. “She has to get up in the morning.”

  “Emma is old enough to solve her own problems,” he said. He looked oddly haggard and was drinking again.

  Lee and Peter left, and Hank and Patsy followed them. Lee and Peter were holding hands. “So it’s really true,” Patsy said. “I saw Bill two days ago. I guess he knows and doesn’t care. Everyone sleeping with everyone and some caring and some not. I’m getting sick. I don’t like being drunk.”

  On the corner of Dunlavy and South Boulevard she was sick. Hank made her sit on the curb to rest a minute. “It’s awful,” she said. “Now Jim has a girl friend. Only he doesn’t sleep with her.” She was sick again. “We’re not even equals in sin,” she said, beginning to sob.

  At home she washed her face and felt much better. All evening at the party she had wanted Hank to touch her. Her skin had wanted that, even when she was annoyed with him. She turned the lights out and went to the couch where he was, only to find that she no longer wanted it. She still wanted to want it, but she had gone cold; the heat and the need had gone. She didn’t want it to have gone; she became desperate for the heat to come back. She was sure that if they made love it would, for she had never made such love as they had made in the last four days. She was sure it would come back, but it didn’t. It did for Hank, but not for her. The harder she tried the less good it did to try, and afterward she was almost sick again, not nauseated but disappointed and confused. “It’s ruined,” she said. “Even that’s ruined now.”

  “It was just the liquor,” Hank insisted. The look in her eyes scared him. It was the first time in weeks he had not been able to reach her.

  “Don’t go yet,” she said. She did not want to be left cold and dreary and a mess. He held her and she grew very sleepy and went to sleep, her face against his arm.

  Then Hank was shaking her in the dark. It was very hard to understand. She just wanted to sleep. There was a very distant ringing. “Wake up,” he said. “Your phone’s ringing.”

  That was the ringing. It was an awful feeling. She could not move. Hank turned on a small lamp. Their clothes were strewn about the couch. Her legs were shaky. Finally she reached the phone, blinking in the light. “It will be Jim,” she said fearfully, as if he would be able to see through the phone, into the room.

  But it wasn’t Jim. It was Sonny Shanks.

  “I was about to give up,” he said. “Sorry to get you up.”

  It seemed a miracle that it wasn’t Jim. “That’s all right,” she said. “I was very sound asleep.”

  “Got bad news,” he said. “Jim had an accident. It ain’t gonna be fatal or nothing like that, but he’s kinda busted up.”

  “God,” she said, shock breaking through her drowsiness. “What? A car wreck?”

  “Sort of,” Sonny said. “We was at a rodeo and he borrowed a horse from an old boy I know. He just wanted to ride around a little. The horse wasn’t very well broke. Something spooked him and he kinda had a runaway. Ran into a car and threw Jim into another car. Nobody hurt but Jim. Awful bad luck.”

  Patsy was waving one hand, pointing at the closet door where her bathrobe hung. Hank went and got it for her.

  “Where is he? How bad is he?”

  “Wichita Falls, General Hospital. Eleanor and I are both here but I got to leave early in the morning, probably before you get here. He’s got a broken hip, one leg broken in two places, broken collarbone. Don’t get in too big an uproar. I’ve seen a lot worse accidents than this one.”

  “I’m not you, Sonny,” she said. She felt blank and cold and hopeless.

  “Tell him I’ll come as soon as I can get a plane.”

  “Eleanor’ll stay till you get here,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t have better news.”

  He hung up, and she hung up. Then she realized that she had already forgotten the name of the hospital. Still, there couldn’t be many in Wichita Falls. Hank had put on his pants. He sat by her on the bed. When he tried to put his arm around her she shoved him away, sickened. He tried again and she let herself rest against him, not up to fighting anything. If only the call were some sort of dreadful dream, the sort you realize is a dream as you wake from it. But she was not dreaming. Her green dress and panties and bra were on the floor.

  “It’s all over,” she said. “Jim’s badly hurt. A horse threw him into a car. I’ve been being a fine wife while he was getting hurt.” She looked with disgust at her scattered garments.

  “Accidental,” Hank said.

  “Sure. Everything’s accidental. It d
oesn’t make me feel different. Why don’t you just go away now and leave me to my mess? I deserve it and there’s nothing more you can do, ever.”

  He picked up her clothes and made some coffee before he left. Patsy lay on the bed crying. When he was gone she dressed and sat up the rest of the night. There were few thoughts in her mind. When it was light she called Emma and asked her to see about Davey and Juanita from time to time. Emma sounded sick at the beginning of the call and solid at the end of it.

  “We’ll take care of them,” she said. “Give our love to Jim.”

  She called her mother, and Jeanette insisted she bring Davey and Juanita to Dallas. It meant taking a later plane, but it was obviously a good idea. Three hours later she handed Davey’s diaper bag to her father in a yellow waiting room at Love Field. Juanita was nervous, and Davey was crying. Patsy couldn’t make him stop. He was still crying anxiously when she had to go to her plane. It was fifty long minutes before the plane left the ground. She sat with her hands clenched, worrying about Davey, wondering how Jim would look, what she would do, what she could say to Eleanor Guthrie, what she would do . . . what she would do.

  16

  WHEN THE DOCTORS told her, the afternoon she arrived, that it would be at least three weeks before he could be moved to Houston, Patsy had thought nothing of it. He was alive, that was enough to ask. His face was a shock. His cheeks were sunken, and it took an effort for him to turn his eyes. He had a concussion that Sonny had forgot to mention. His face had so little life in it the first two days that she could think of nothing to say to him. Silence enveloped her. The nurses chattered, the doctor spoke with authority, Jim asked for Coke; she answered with the thinnest and most convenient conventionalities. She remembered a dream she had had of Jim dying in a plane crash, and herself a widow, and the memory only made her feel lower. It had been almost a pleasant dream, and the reality of the hospital room was anything but pleasant. The room was air-conditioned to an almost intolerable degree of chill. Patsy’s hands were always cold; she had not brought a sweater and had to buy one. Jim’s hip was in traction and at first he was very dopey. There was nothing to do or say, and at first she could not read. With his face looking so thin he seemed pitiful. She could not even have a genuine warm fit of crying. When he was clearheaded she could think of nothing to say. It was all she could do to call him dear. There were indignities: enemas, and the constant urine samples which she was left to coax out of him. He had blood in his urine at first and the doctors were worried about kidney damage. The room was never quite dark and she couldn’t sleep; the nurses were always coming in; shafts of light fell across her face. Sometimes she held Jim’s hand, but neither her hand nor Jim’s had any grip. The only places to walk were the hot treeless streets, baking hot until seven in the evening.

  There had been no scene with Eleanor; the sight of Jim left Patsy feeling numb, and Eleanor left within twenty minutes of her arrival. She was neither overfriendly nor oversolicitous. Patsy watched her through the blinds as she walked down the hospital sidewalk. She got in a blue Lincoln and drove away. That afternoon some flowers came with Eleanor’s name on the card. After that there was nothing.

  As soon as Patsy knew that Jim was not going to die or be seriously crippled, an overwhelming boredom set in. By the evening of the first afternoon she was bored. By the third morning she could hardly believe she was herself. It seemed impossible that she could sit in a hospital room with her own husband and him badly injured and have so little feeling, for him or anyone. The Hortons sent a spray of mums; through no fault of theirs, the florist put them in a horrible brown football-shaped vase. Patsy was too bored to be annoyed. She called Dallas twice a day to see how Davey was, but once she was assured he was okay she was too bored to do more than make small progress reports on Jim. She really didn’t want to talk about anything with anyone. The chill room immobilized her and seemed to slow her blood. She sat for two and three hours at a stretch, not reading, not thinking, just sitting. The entrance of the nurses annoyed her. Jim was too dopey to talk. Hank had told her he was having a phone put in, so on the fourth day she called to see if he had. He had, but she didn’t want to talk to him, either. Nothing he said reached her. Still, out of boredom, she called him back that night. On the fifth day she moved out of the hospital into a downtown hotel, so she could sleep whole nights, and she began to talk to Hank more often. He suggested that he come to Wichita Falls to keep her company. The thought sickened her. “I don’t think I’ve sunk that low,” she said and didn’t call him back for a week.

  It occurred to her to call Roger, whose ranch was not far away. He would come and stay as long as she needed him, but she didn’t call. She had worked out an existence, at the hospital and the hotel, the first existence she had ever had that involved an absence of feeling. She didn’t cry, she didn’t complain, she didn’t pity herself; she did what little there was to do, and then she sat. She didn’t want Roger to come. A real person might break through the feelinglessness, and she wouldn’t be able to handle it. Her mother wanted to come, but Patsy wouldn’t let her. She wanted nobody—nobody.

  Before a week had passed, however, someone appeared: her husband Jim. At first he seemed not Jim but an object made of plaster and white skin, a bad sculpture with one leg permanently extended in the air. He said almost nothing and slept a great deal. She did not think about him much, because there seemed no one there to think about. She thought about her own heartlessness, in not feeling more, but couldn’t help it. Holding his hand was a little unpleasant, as was the whole business of urine samples. Little of Jim seemed to be there. She could hardly remember a time when he had been all there, when they had handled each other with love, or at least with heat. There was no heat in the room anywhere, not in the air, not in Jim, not in her.

  Then, gradually, he began to come back to himself. For three days he was very restless, tormented by the casts and his own immobility. He began to want liquids, and to need attentions, and Patsy ceased to be able to be immobile. He began to look at her through Jim’s eyes, not through the dull eyes of a doped person. She would see him looking at her and be reminded of herself. She had all but forgotten her appearance. She saw a dull face in the mirror in the mornings, sometimes a dull body in the same mirror as she was drying after a shower; but she didn’t really see herself until Jim began to see her again. He itched, he was hot, he was thirsty, he had to pee, he wanted a magazine, or he wanted to be read to. He began to want to eat.

  She herself became hungry one day and walked several blocks in the blinding noonday sun until she found a drugstore where she could get a milkshake and a grilled cheese sandwich. She could not remember a bite of the food she ate the first five days in the hospital. She drank many Cokes; the taste of them was always in her mouth. Gradually she began to leave the room more often, when Jim was napping or reading. There was a brown little park a few blocks away, very hot during the daytime but not so bad in the cool of the evening. She sometimes walked there and sat in a swing, amid children. They made her miss Davey. It was a high park, with a long sweep of sky to the north, toward Oklahoma; once she saw an airman and his girl holding hands in a car and was reminded of the park in Cheyenne. By rights Pete Tatum should come and hold her hand, as she had held his when his spouse had a broken hip. It might be cheering, but it wouldn’t happen.

  Jim decided he wanted a TV in his room and they rented one and sat watching it for hours, dully, arguing a little, seldom seeing anything they liked but somehow lulled by it. At least it was something they could discuss with the nurses, whose absent chattiness was driving them both mad. Inasmuch as it was awkward to shave, Jim had begun to grow a beard, and that too was something to talk about with the nurses. Patsy felt noncommital toward the beard project. Watching it grow was almost as dull as watching TV, but she couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t have a beard if he wanted one.

  As soon as Jim became really clearheaded they both began to feel like talking to each other, something it
seemed they hadn’t done in months. The only difficulty was that neither wanted to talk about what the other one wanted to talk about. Patsy didn’t pick at him about Eleanor, not at all. Eleanor’s cool attitude had convinced her that the whole thing was one of Jim’s fantasies. She had a feeling his crush had got no further than a few double entendres slipped into literary conversations. Eleanor did not seem like the kind of woman who would be won by Jim, somehow. She mentioned Eleanor once, and Jim became annoyed and defensive, as if talk would tarnish the gold of his memory of it all, so Patsy dropped it. He was even less in the mood to talk about his disastrous horseback ride. All he knew was that the horse had bolted and he had been unable to stop it. What he was most eager to talk about was what everyone in Houston had been doing all summer. It was an awkward subject, since Patsy had paid scant attention all summer, and it was made even more awkward by the fact that Jim seemed mostly interested in Hank. His curiosity was entirely innocent, but it was still awkward to handle. She was forced into direct lies, for one thing, and at the same time was annoyed with Jim because he had managed, entirely through the workings of his own fantasy, to turn Hank into one of his best friends. A year before if he had wanted Hank for a friend she would have been glad. As it was, it seemed to her impossible, an indecent irony life had thrust upon them.