Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Please see if you can make him come out,” she said. “And don’t beat him or anything.”

  “It’s not like I beat him every day,” Flap said morosely and went to see what he could do. After a while Emma heard his voice. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the tones that came from the kitchen were patient and she felt grateful and wiped her eyes on her apron. Teddy had forgotten about the disaster with the TV and, glad to have his brother out of the room, came over to Emma rather shyly and with a big grin held out a pack of cards. It was his favorite game and he almost never got to play it just as he liked to play it, which was with his mother and no one else. Tommy was an aggressive card player and knew rules that involved Teddy having to give up every card he really wanted. Emma, on the other hand, knew no rules; when she and Teddy played, all was merry. They dealt each other hands with great formality and examined them with great secrecy, and despite Emma’s elaborate precautions Teddy invariably managed to get all the kings and queens and jacks, the cards he liked best. With him so happy it was hard to be too downcast, but Emma kept seeing, from time to time, Tommy curled on the pantry shelf, and kept listening for a change in Flap’s voice, half expecting it to rise into anger. But it didn’t, and after twenty minutes Tommy marched in looking cheerful and took command of the card game. Teddy turned sullen immediately and clutched such cards as he had in a death grip.

  “We really do need new cards,” Tommy observed. “These are a little sticky. It’s Teddy’s fault. He drools on them.”

  Teddy got up and took his hand across the room. When Tommy got up to go after him he flung them down indifferently, as if cards had lost all appeal.

  “Pick ’em up, Ted,” Flap said. He sat down on the couch, looking a little drained.

  “Gosh, you’re a genius,” Emma said. “Thank you. How’d you do it?”

  “I guess we’re going to the planetarium tomorrow. Pick those cards up, Ted. We don’t throw cards on the floor.”

  Teddy put his foot on a card and scooted it back and forth, a calm reflective look on his face as he considered his father’s command. “Me throw ’em down,” he said, looking up cheerfully, as if it should be obvious that he could not pick up what he had thrown down.

  “Please pick them up,” Emma said.

  “Me throw ’em down,” Teddy insisted, still cheerful. He grinned slyly, picked up one card, came and dropped it in Emma’s lap and moved rapidly off in the direction of his fire engine. Emma rolled her eyes in despair and Flap stood up, swooped Teddy up and dangled him horizontally a few inches above the cards until he grew red in the face from laughing. When he was set down he casually picked up the rest of the cards.

  “He hasn’t learned very many manners,” Tommy said. “Not near as many as I know.”

  “I agree,” Emma said. “Could you go run your bath?”

  Later, the boys asleep, she emerged from the bathroom in her nightgown and surprised Flap in a strange state. He was watching the late news, the TV set having refreshed itself in the interim. As she came into the room barefooted, he turned and saw her and quickly brushed his hand across his eyes as if to wipe away tears. She pretended not to notice and went to the kitchen and fixed some coffee, but she felt scared. There had been a time just after his father died when Flap had been prone to depressions and occasional tears, but that had been three years before and it had been understandable. He and his father had been very close—they sailed a lot in a sailboat that Flap had had to sell when his father passed away. She went in with the coffee and saw that she had been right. His face looked hollow.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said, alarmed. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No. Why should I be? You’re bringing me coffee, just like you’re supposed to.”

  “Quit joking,” she said. “Tell me why you’re sad. I don’t like you being forlorn. It scares me.”

  “I’m not very forlorn,” he said. “Maybe it’s the goddamn TV. I hate scenes like the one with Tommy. I don’t like a child of mine getting wrought up over a porpoise.”

  “It’s not just a porpoise,” she said. “For god’s sake. Come out of your ivory tower. Didn’t you get wrought up over Lassie?”

  “I guess,” he said. “You needn’t get mad.”

  “I always get mad when I’m scared,” she said. “Why were you crying? Is it me or is it prelims?”

  “Quit acting neurotic,” he said, grinning a little. “Fat girls are not supposed to be neurotic.

  “It wasn’t you,” he added. “I was just thinking about Daddy and the boys—never getting to know one another, I mean. They would have liked one another so well.” And despite himself his eyes filled at the thought.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Emma said. “Poor man. At least he got to see Tommy.”

  “Tommy was too little to remember him, though.”

  Emma sat down by the couch and put her head on his knee; Flap rubbed her neck meditatively. “Tommy is a lot more like him than Teddy is,” she said.

  “Oh, sure. Teddy has no recognizable progenitors.”

  “He does too. He has us. We progenited him right in this room.”

  “How do I know that?” Flap asked lightly. “He’s not serious or demented enough to be my son. You might have begot him with a passing stranger.”

  “I’m too fat and unneurotic for passing strangers,” she said. “My father wasn’t as interesting as yours.”

  “He was in his way,” Flap said, though only to be nice. He and her father had had no rapport. Her father had considered his daughter thrown away on a bum like Flap. He had made a small fortune but had not expected to die when he did; most of his estate went in inheritance taxes. Emma’s mother still kept the large family house in River Oaks, a house she could ill afford. She had grown extremely tight with her money and spent most of her time talking about whether she should sell the house and take an apartment. She and Flap got on indifferently but were not actively hostile to each other.

  “I wish we had the Carpenters’ money,” Flap said. “Then we could afford sitters and could go out on Saturday night and have more fun than anybody. Instead we sit home with our broken TV. Do you suppose Teddy will ever learn to say ‘my’ instead of ‘me’?”

  “Don’t rush him. I have to have a baby.”

  “Sure, but there’s no point in retarding Teddy. You can have a real baby.”

  “I don’t want to yet. Not until we get moved and see if we like it.”

  Flap sighed and was silent. “Quit that,” Emma said. “You can’t possibly fail. Besides, I don’t like you envying Jim and Patsy. I bet they’re sitting home squabbling, just like we are.”

  “I bet their TV works, at least,” he said. “I don’t think about them particularly. I just envy them their money. Are they really going to buy the Duffin house?”

  “Patsy can’t make up her mind. She’s so strange these days. Jim’s being an invalid is having a bad effect on her. I don’t think they’re getting on too well.”

  “They never have,” Flap said. “Why should they start now?”

  “They have too. They just argue a lot. We argue, don’t we?”

  “You snipe at me. I bear it with dignity. We don’t argue like they argue.”

  “Jim changes his mind too often,” Emma said. “If he’d ever decided what to be, Patsy would be okay.”

  “Let’s go to bed. I hate to sit and look at a blank TV on Saturday night.”

  He went and brushed his teeth and they lay in bed reading for more than an hour. Flap was poring morosely over a large red history of English literature, written by Baugh, Brooke, Chew, Malone, and Sherburn. He had been poring over it for six months and Emma had come to hate it. Each page contained thirty dates and thirty titles, and there were eleven hundred pages, or so Flap said, making something like sixty-six thousand facts he might be asked. Emma was reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She was very fond of Muriel Spark and fancied that if she ever took up writing she would write like her. Fro
m time to time she rubbed Flap’s stomach, hoping he would finish with Baugh, Brooke, Chew, Malone, and Sherburn and talk to her. It was not the best Muriel Spark, she didn’t think.

  “How you coming on facts?” she asked.

  “I’m coming. It’s theories and interpretations that are beginning to worry me now.”

  “How many of those are there?”

  “Roughly sixty-six thousand,” he said. “Approximately one for every fact.”

  “Are you planning to make a pass at me? I’m sleepy.”

  “It’s an idea,” Flap said. “I’ve got a malaise tonight.”

  “I know,” she said, closing her book. “I wish your dad had met Teddy, even if they aren’t alike.”

  “Me too,” Flap said quietly. He put the book on the floor with a heavy thump, went to the bathroom, and came back and turned out the light.

  “Check on Teddy, please, while you’re up,” Emma said. “Unwad his blanket from around his neck. He has a compulsion to smother himself and it’s muggy tonight.” Flap turned the light back on and went to the boys’ room and Emma remembered that she had let Tommy go to bed with a heavy undershirt on and got up herself to see if he was too hot.

  “Look at him,” Flap said, indicating Teddy, who was sprawled on his back. “He’s soaked.”

  Emma went over briefly and touched her son, and indeed Teddy’s chest and neck were slick with sweat where he had had his blanket wound. But it didn’t worry her. “Oh, he gets that way every night,” she said. “He’ll cool. I think I’ll take Tommy’s nightshirt off.” She began to, tugging it up, but it was very difficult to get one of Tommy’s elbows out of the armhole and he half awoke and frowned in protest and then his face softened into sleep again immediately when she got the nightshirt off. She took the nightshirt and put it on the boys’ bureau and turned in surprise at a strange sound from Flap. He was standing with his elbows on the rail of Teddy’s baby bed, looking at Teddy and sniffing back tears. Emma was not disquieted, as she had been earlier. She folded the nightshirt and went over and stood by him, her arm around his waist. Teddy, luxurious in his sleep, lay on his back, one knee drawn up slightly, one bare foot curled slightly in, his mouth open, sleeping as if all peace and all security were his. So sweet, Emma thought, reaching in to straighten his plastic pants where they had been tucked under his diaper uncomfortably.

  “He is sort of like Dad,” Flap said, still racked with memory. “It just doesn’t show yet.”

  “It must to you,” she said, leaning her head against his shoulder for a minute. Then she left him and went back to bed and in a few minutes Flap came too, much calmed. He gave his wife a kiss when he got in bed. Neither of them felt sexy, but they didn’t feel sleepy either, and they lay awake for an hour, talking of Flap’s father and of Emma’s, and holding hands.

  20

  BY THE END OF OCTOBER Patsy knew in full what was meant by duplicity. In spirit and in flesh, she knew, and it was no mere romantic schizophrenia, a matter of being two women in the same skin. She was two women in two different skins—women of differing minds and differing hearts. Her days lost all consistency; pleasure and distress, desire and shame beset her by turns, and she never knew in the morning which skin she would wear in the afternoon. “Who said love was fun?” she said one day, tugging on a blue sweater. She was the old Patsy, shamed, stiff, depressed. Her hair was tangled. But when Hank kissed her she grew soft and sullen and felt like biting. “It’s something but it’s not fun,” she said a few minutes later. And once she had changed skins again she looked wearily at the rumpled bed where she had been when she was someone else. “Of course it’s not love, either,” she said, putting her comb in her purse.

  Hank yawned; he didn’t believe her. For him it was certainly love. He was as blank in his desire as he had been at first. Patsy looked at him hostilely, angry that he still understood her so little. He really noted nothing except her body—it was her body he knew, not her. He behaved as if, so far as he knew, they would go on making love every day forever. He hadn’t noticed that something had already changed, that she no longer came to him every day so suffused with feeling that she couldn’t think. She might come eagerly, she might come reluctantly, she might be happy or she might be sad, but she was no longer mindless, and she was seldom carried out of herself, no matter how well they made love.

  She sat on the bed, dressed to leave, and looked at him, aware of an odd disappointment. There were so many men in the world—who was he, from whose bed she had just risen? Why him? He scarcely spoke to her. There must be many for whom she could feel everything she had first felt for him. It made her feel strange. She wanted him to be unique and irreplaceable, the only man she could care about, someone who could hold her. And yet the moment she thought it she knew it wouldn’t be so.

  “Something’s changing,” she said.

  “You’re getting sexier,” Hank said.

  Patsy shook her head, though it was true enough. Physically things were very satisfactory between them.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant it when I said it wasn’t love.”

  Hank was silent, his usual defenses were caught unprepared by her directness.

  “Maybe I was just desperate for someone to want me the way you do,” she said, looking him in the eye. Hank was scared by the calmness in her face when she spoke. He would have fallen back on his second defense, which was sex, but Patsy was dressed to go and he knew he couldn’t reach her. He didn’t say anything.

  “Okay,” she said. “I warned you. Enjoy your delusions. If you want to be the love of my life you’ve got to do more than screw me.

  “I just thought I’d tell you,” she added as she was leaving. He looked pained and puzzled, and she felt sorry for him as she walked home. He didn’t really know anything else to do. That night at home she became very silent and felt more completely alone than she had ever felt. She had two men, two nice men, even; and no confidence that either of them was going to do.

  Before the month was gone she had had to recognize that something was dying. The season was taking with it a version of herself, one Patsy of the two that had come to exist. She knew that the summer had changed her, but she was a long time admitting that the change was permanent. She wanted to go back to being the Patsy she had been before the summer—the Patsy who lived with and cared for Jim. The other Patsy, the Patsy who slept with Hank, was not acceptable. That Patsy had no right to exist; she deserved no recognition and no consideration. She was the result of some unwanted revolution of the blood—she was illegal and irresponsible. One thing both Patsys agreed upon was that the two of them could not possibly co-exist, not in the same town, in the same garments, moving among the same people.

  October came and went, more like summer than fall, and yet like fall also. Patsy felt a terrible solstice approaching; she didn’t want it to come but she knew of no way to avert it. For her it was no mellow season, but a time of gorging, of swollen hours that the cool, quiet, fastidious woman that she sometimes was could not recollect pleasantly. Only occasionally, in between times, was she the Patsy she was sure of.

  Those times were always when she was home, with Jim and Davey. Then, more than ever, she dreaded the solstice. When she was in quiet moods the thought of change seemed dreadful—why should anything change? It was emotion that blurred everything; if only she could keep calm and look at matters clearly for a few days then she might be able to straighten herself out, align her emotions with her responsibilities and keep anything really bad from happening. Calmness and clarity were what she needed, and a few simple feelings that she could not doubt.

  Davey, at least, was still simple, and at times Jim seemed simple too. At night, watching television with him, or reading beside him in bed, he sometimes seemed far nicer than she gave him credit for being. His needs were not desperate or extreme and he was probably less complex than she made him out to be. It occurred to her at times that all he needed was humoring, of a skillful and considerat
e kind. He needed lightness and chatter and food and for her to be lovely, and Davey well, and a pursuit to be involved in, and a modicum of sex—for so little as that he could be happy, a thought that only made her the more distressed with herself. Even the little that he needed seemed not easily providable. She had the maddening feeling that something was ruining them, and the most maddening thing about the feeling was the sense that if she could ever for one moment put her finger on the exact cause of the decay, she could stop it. Probably the root of the trouble was herself: her selfishness, her feverishness, her foolish destructive desire for things Jim could not give. Half the time she was convinced that their troubles were all her fault; the other half she was convinced they were all his fault. She could not rid herself of the conviction that he was playing games he ought to have outgrown. He didn’t want enough; she wanted too much. Neither of them could quite determine the nature of what it was that was lacking.

  Four times in one week, in the middle of October, she had fits of causeless incoherent weeping because she felt the hopelessness of ever having what she wanted. And yet she was as distrustful of her sorrows as she was of her happiness, on the days when she was happy. Some days, when things went well with Hank, her spirits rose very high, and she felt it was more natural to be happy than to be unhappy. It might only be a matter of sticking to simple tasks. Davey was a good age to be taken about in the world, and taking him about was a delight. Safety, happiness, normalcy, even gaiety seemed to lie in the simplest domestic tasks—in cooking breakfast, in buying new sheets, in giving Davey his bath. Breakfasts and baths and shopping she handled splendidly. If happiness lay in handling such things splendidly then she was enviable. But if happiness lay in large things rather than small, in the fulfillment of major needs and adequacy to major responsibilities, then she felt lost. Honor and honesty, fidelity, responsibility, duty, love, all did less for her spirits than buying baby clothes and cooking waffles. There were days when the ability to cook a good breakfast seemed the only hope for her character.