“We’ll have to have him over a lot this fall,” Jim said cheerfully.
The remark frightened her, as did all talk of the fall. Jim loved to talk about the future, but all his talks echoed earlier talks; they held tones that she could remember too well, and were filled with prognostications of things he would never do. Even Davey became a sore spot. She had begun to miss him severely; she would wake up in the night wondering if he were crying, unhappy without her, or what. When she called her mother and heard him babble in the background she could hardly keep herself from going to Dallas, though she knew that a hurried visit would only disorient him. He seemed to be fine. Jim loved to talk about him; he loved to listen to her tell about him. In a way it was natural that he would want to hear about his son, but in another way it annoyed her. It was as if he liked to think about Davey more than he liked to be with him. She enjoyed talking about him too, but it was no consolation for not having him in her lap. It worried her, and she tried to frame some careful sentence that would make Jim see that it was precisely that attitude of his that was at the center of what was wrong with them. She understood it so clearly, or thought she did, but she could never frame the sentence. She was afraid he would take it as a sign of her dissatisfaction with him and withdraw further into plans and fantasies.
Much of the time, though, they didn’t argue. They were quite amicable. Patsy went downtown to a bookshop and bought lots of paperbacks, scholarly ones for Jim, more frivolous ones for herself, and they read and got on well through the second week and into the third. There were little problems, one being that Jim kept wanting to kiss her. She didn’t want to be kissed. Once his pain subsided, boredom produced a kind of low omnipresent sexuality; he spoke happily of all the love they would make when he was well. He was always catching her hand, telling her how sexy she looked, trying to get her to sit on the bed. When Patsy did kiss him she felt afraid, afraid that he would discover how really turned off she was, where he was concerned. She pleaded the grotesqueness of the casts and the constant parade of nurses, and kept her distance. But what she wished most of all was that he would quit talking about it—stop talking about the future at all. The more he talked about sex the less she wanted it. Despite herself, she began to long for Hank, who didn’t talk about it. She tried to keep the talk in the present, on the books they were reading, the ball game, or the soap opera on TV, but Jim’s mind kept leaping ahead, and the more it did the more she felt her body dragging behind and setting its feet.
One morning a few days before they were to leave Jim spoke of the leaving in a tone of light regret. “I almost hate to go,” he said. “It’s so nice, just the two of us. It’s been a long time since you’ve given me so much attention.”
“Yep, you’re a pampered invalid,” she said. She had been out shopping and had brought him a Greta Garbo button and some new pajamas.
But that night, in her hotel, sitting by the window watching the neon sign of an insurance agency flash from across the street, the remark came back to haunt her. She saw it as altogether true. For the first time in a long time Jim had her just as he wanted her. His role and hers were clear. He was free to idealize her, to make much of her sexiness, of her wit, of her attentiveness. She was his wife again, in the purest and most handleable sense. His scholarly interests, his parental interests, his sexual interests, all were revived. He talked about his thesis, about Davey, about lovemaking. He seemed to have forgotten his summer crush, and of the mystery of her summer he had no inkling. To Jim their future was clear; to her it was even more obscure than their past.
She called Hank occasionally, but did not talk much. She refused to commit herself to anything, refused to say what she would do when she returned to Houston. She could not say because she didn’t know, and she did not want to speculate, either in her mind or over the phone. She squelched all speculation, Hank’s directly, Jim’s with wit rather than conviction. She was not convinced of anything and did not particularly want to be. When Jim wanted to kiss her she felt as if the chill of the room had transferred itself inside her, as if her lungs and blood had been transformed into a central cooling unit, so that heart and body alike were kept stable at a very low but very even temperature.
And then, the second day they were back in Houston, with Jim comfortably settled in his bed, books on every hand, with Davey re-established in his kingdom, and Juanita there to see after them, and the Hortons expected in the evening, she concocted a mythical errand for herself and, ashamed and terrified and lonely, went straight to Hank’s. It was a very hot day. Hank was lying on his couch with no shirt on, reading Sports Illustrated. His breath on her face knocked out the cooling unit in her breast; his hands turned her warm again. The apartment’s old rattly air conditioner had been broken down for two weeks and he had been too dilatory to get it fixed, so, hurriedly, wet by the heat of August, they stripped and went to bed.
17
“OF THE TWO OF US my lot is definitely the darker,” Emma said. They were in the park, late in a day in September, watching their three children and discussing their marital plights. Emma had nothing to do but watch; Patsy’s role was more active. Davey had grown big enough for the park swings, those that had a bar across them to hold infants in. They came to the park almost every evening and Davey’s enjoyment of swinging had become an addiction. Patsy leaned against one of the iron swing supports, shoving him forward every time the swing returned to her. A promising little norther had blown in that day, very slight, no more than a breath of coolness, and instead of lifting their spirits it only sunk them further, for they knew the temperature would be back to ninety the next day. Patsy was blue, Emma was blue. A boy and a girl were laughing and throwing a frisbee on the north side of the park and the sight of such lightness, such happy frivolity, made them both feel middle-aged. It was hard for either of them to remember when boys had taken them to the park to play. It was the sort of gaiety that belonged to youth. Teddy and Tommy were playing in the sandbox and exhibiting what, for them, was unusual rapport. Emma sat in one of the swings smoking. She had taken to smoking more and had lost weight. She was shaped for plumpness and the loss of only a few pounds made her face look gaunt.
“But think,” Patsy said. “The exams will be over in two weeks and then Flap will be a big success and get a job at some glamorous school. Jim won’t even get his casts off for nearly a month.”
“Psychic wounds never heal,” Emma said. “Flap has psychic wounds.”
“No he doesn’t. It’s just exam anxiety.”
“Well, I do then. I keep wishing I were a book, so he’d look at me. He’s even quit swatting the boys. Even their noise doesn’t penetrate to him now.”
“We have opposite problems,” Patsy said. “Maybe we could swap houses for a few days. I’d love to be around a man who didn’t notice me.”
Davey squalled, looking at her indignantly. The swing was stopping. His hair was dark like hers and had grown longish; people were not sure whether he was a boy or a girl. It irked her—he seemed to her unmistakably masculine. She swung him high and his blissful expression returned.
“I didn’t expect to feel middle-aged so early in life,” Emma said.
“I don’t feel middle-aged. I just feel unyoung.”
As they were talking, the Duffins walked by and waved at them. They had just come from Rice. Bill had his black leather briefcase; Lee carried a couple of books. She was dressed like a college girl, in a brown sweater and skirt, and had let her hair grow a little longer. Bill wore a green corduroy sports coat. They were laughing and seemed in the best of spirits.
“I don’t know where they get off, being happy,” Patsy said. She was bored with swinging and lifted Davey out and put him in his carriage. He protested, but she ignored him. Emma gave her boys a come-on wave, but they ignored her and went on building a sand fort.
“Okay, boys,” Emma said.
“Just two more minutes, please,” Tommy said, patting the sand. He was secure in the knowledge that he co
uld not be denied as long as he asked politely.
“They’re probably happy because their kids are gone,” Emma said. “Why shouldn’t Lee be happy? Peter’s really nice, and he’s crazy about her. It must be nice having somebody crazy about you. Maybe Duffin is pleasant too, if you don’t have to depend on him.
“I don’t know why, but I’m annoyed with her,” Patsy said. “She makes me feel more conserative than I really am.”
“I think it’s just that you really are conservative,” Emma said, motioning sternly to the boys. “You’re like me. I’d be scared to death if somebody was crazy about me.”
The sandy boys kicked in their fort and they all walked home together, Patsy in a silent brood. She had somebody crazy about her, two somebodies, for that matter, and had just begun to realize that she wasn’t really crazy about either of them, neither husband nor lover. It was a new problem. Davey sucked his pacifier and hung to the sides of the carriage when she wrestled it off curbs. Emma gave her boys a desultory lecture on what was fair and what wasn’t.
“You could have another baby,” Tommy said. “Then if it was a boy I’d have two brothers and if they tried to beat me up and I won, it would be okay because they would be two against one and that’s no fair.”
“You’d be bigger than both of them put together,” Emma said. “That would make it unfair. I’ve got all the boys I need as it is.”
Teddy was trudging along silently, a little morose, well aware that if anyone got beaten up in the near future it would be him. He was interested in pill bugs and when he saw one crawling along stopped and turned it into a pill. Once he did it suddenly and Patsy almost ran him down with the baby carriage.
“Oh, sorry,” she said.
Teddy looked at Davey as if he were ripe for slaughter. Davey looked at him adoringly.
“I don’t think Jim’s the beard type,” Emma said.
“Nope,” Patsy said. “He just started it in the hospital to have something to do. He’ll get tired of it pretty soon.”
That evening before her mirror she concluded again that she didn’t look well. She looked either feverish or anemic, either flushed and hot or pale and drawn. She did not look lightly happy, as Lee Duffin had looked that afternoon. She looked, it seemed to her, like a woman whose life had gone wrong and was apt to go yet more wrong. Both her husband and her lover told her she looked great, but she had taken to discounting both their opinions; she was not sure either knew her well, and she looked in her own face to try and discover what was wrong inside her.
And yet, what was wrong was not just inside her, it was outside her as well. Something had started that she couldn’t stop, and something had stopped that she couldn’t start again; that which had started, except in one particular, was really no better than that which had stopped, but whether it was better or worse scarcely seemed to matter. It was started, and the one particular was a strong particular, and there was nothing she could do about it. She knew the fault must be in her, for there was nothing drastically wrong with either of the men involved. Only that evening Jim had courteously yielded a point she had been pressing for days: he had agreed that they ought to buy a house. He had only resisted, so he said, because owning a house would set them above all the other graduate students. They had to have one, though; Davey needed a room of his own. Jim had given in, and had given in with grace. She could start looking the next day.
She should have been happy with her victory, but as she combed her hair she felt low. He was watching her as she sat at her dressing table. He loved to watch her, and his looks were expectant. And he had every right to be expectant; not of sex, necessarily, for he could still barely move, but of affection at least, a bit of lightness and niceness on her part. Instead, all she wanted was for the lights to be off. She had been sleeping on the couch because of his casts. It was an easy couch to sleep on, and until she was on it and the lights out she felt slightly pressured at night, pressured to give some wifely affection that she had ceased to feel.
What made it worse was that Jim had ceased to demand anything. For a time after he got home he had been very grabby and was always wanting her in bed, but he had apparently decided that his casts made him unpleasant for her and had started leaving her alone, except with his eyes and his voice. He was always paying her compliments. There were times when she read in the john, just to be alone, and she lingered in the kitchen as long as possible. She did not tell him that her reluctance had nothing to do with his casts. She did not tell him anything. She would have been hard pressed to recall five words she had said to him since their return, so inconsequential was her conversation. The house had been the only serious issue they had to talk about, and that was settled. It was awful to feel no gratitude, but she felt none, nor any particular delight at the thought of house hunting or decorating. A year before, even a few months before, the prospect would have filled her with happiness, with rapture and ideas and energy. Now it merely seemed like a necessary chore. Davey had to have a room that was not their bedroom. What she and Jim would do in the rest of the house she could not imagine.
“Need anything?” she asked, turning out the lamp on her dresser. She yawned and it was not a faked yawn either; she was always tired at night, glad of the time when she could leave it all alone and go to sleep.
Jim was reading, alternating between The Rise of the Novel and a fat Eric Ambler omnibus that she had found him secondhand. “What’s the late movie?” he asked. “I’m tired of reading. Want to watch TV awhile?”
“Not desperately,” she said, but she went to the TV and wheeled it over where he could see it better. The guide was lost—it was always lost. She went to the kitchen and found the day’s paper and looked up the late movie.
“It’s something called Vera Cruz,” she said. “Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper, Denise Darcel, and others.”
“Let’s watch a little. Come and sit with me awhile.”
She turned the TV on and went to the bed, but instead of sitting with him she lay on her stomach, her face on her arms. There was the sound of gunfire from behind her. “Burt Lancaster seems to be the bad guy,” Jim said, stroking her hair. “It’s about Maximilian.”
He slipped a hand inside her gown and rubbed her back between her shoulder blades. “I really don’t know what I’d do without you,” he said, not in an urgent tone but merely conversationally. It was his new bit: needing her. One of the discoveries of his convalescence was that for years he had been needing her without acknowledging that he needed her. He attributed such troubles as they had had to his own pride, his need to appear independent. The admission of his need made him feel enormously hopeful. In the future they would function together, each needing the other.
For a few days Patsy liked it. It was a long overdue recognition, so far as she was concerned. She liked him trying to be honest about himself. She liked him playing with Davey—that too was long overdue. But he soon overworked the need bit. It led to problems. She could scarcely put mustard on his hot dog without him praising her considerateness, and she began to wonder if he would ever again put mustard on his own hot dogs. He had certainly adapted beautifully to invalidism. She had the feeling that he could be getting mobile again more quickly than he was, that he was boondoggling on his broken bones. She had the nagging feeling that he liked staying in bed, in casts, amid books, his need shining pure, more or less. It made her a little edgy. Being needed was nice up to a point, but as things stood she could not help feeling that his need had peaked at a bad time. A little of that need and appreciation earlier might have welded them together. As it was, she felt slightly uneasy, not sure she wanted him needing her all that much, and even less sure that she still needed him. She had been forced to be independent for two months and the result was that she felt independent. She didn’t want anyone putting mustard on her hot dog. When, occasionally, she took a poll within herself to determine what she did need Jim for, the results were not encouraging. She was glad to have him her husband in the eyes of her fr
iends, and she wanted him to be a father to Davey, but for herself, woman to man, she was not sure she needed anything from him.
When he said he didn’t know what he would do without her she turned her face toward him and he stroked her cheek. “You’d make out,” she said and kissed his hand a little guiltily. His sincerity sometimes unnerved her and made her ashamed of herself. He might be foolish but he was almost always sincere and she could not remember if she had ever been sincere with him. She kissed his fingers and wished she felt more. He had been hurt—his bones were really broken. He deserved an affectionate wife.
She sat up and let him hold her hand; they watched the movie awhile. She wished the feeling of dullness would leave her. Jim was too cheerful even to notice that she was dull. “Gary Cooper looks kind of sick,” he said. “How long was this before he died?”
“Don’t ask me?” she said, idly picking up the Eric Ambler book and looking into it. Jim put his hand under her gown again, stroking the tops of her breasts. “Why do people like to read about spies?” she asked, hoping he would quit. She had come, automatically, to try and counter his touch with conversation.
“Why not? They’re kind of interesting. There must be thousands of them sneaking about. It’s a wonder we don’t know any.”
“I don’t want to know any. I know too many people as it is.” She shut her eyes, though it was not a bad movie. Burt Lancaster was bad with a flair. He had a great smile. Jim was touching her nipples, one and then the other, lightly. She wanted him to quit but she didn’t move. “You have a nice bosom,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Slow coming but worth waiting for.”
“I’d rather it wasn’t discussed in those terms.” She grew drowsy and went to sleep. When the movie was over he awakened her. She was dazed with sleep and a little troubled to find herself asleep in bed with her own husband. She got up to turn the TV off.
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