Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “What do you do for fun, Mrs. Carpenter?” he asked, flabbergasting Patsy completely. She hadn’t had any in some time, and the last she could remember had involved Hank and a bed.

  “I mean, what are your amusements?” he asked by way of clarification.

  When she finally said she liked to read he nodded, as if it were very meaningful. When the hour was finally waning, with nothing significant having been said, Dr. Fuller briskly picked up the phone and made them appointments for a battery of psychological tests.

  “Then we’ll know something,” he assured her merrily.

  They took the tests the next day, Patsy in the morning, Jim in the afternoon. Patsy enjoyed them; she had always been good at tests. The man who gave them was a grave middle-aged gentleman named Mr. Penny. He took his job seriously and explained the tests in such detail that they would have been comprehensible to a three-year-old. She enjoyed the verbal tests and had a great time with the Rorschach.

  Jim was not so lucky. After a year in graduate school, tests in which one arranged circles and triangles and matched words struck him as silly. He didn’t see how it was going to help. For him, the Rorschach was an absolute calamity. Virtually every blot looked like a vagina. Mr. Penny became even more grave and finally grew visibly upset.

  “Are you sure you’re looking hard enough?” he asked after eight straight blots had been vaginas.

  “There may be something wrong with my vision,” Jim said morosely. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it looks like.”

  So did the next one, but he decided to lie in order to spare Mr. Penny’s sensibilities. He saw a pelvis.

  “Well, that’s less specific,” Mr. Penny said hopefully, shifting his blots.

  By stretching his imagination to the utmost, Jim managed to see a couple of crabs, a spider, and a butterfly. At his vaguest he saw a cloud. But there were still a scandalous number of blots that looked like nothing more than vaginas. Mr. Penny was deeply offended.

  “Surely you can see something else,” he said sternly.

  “No,” Jim said.

  Mr. Penny searched among the blots to find one that could not possibly look like a vagina. “Your wife saw a coach-and-four,” he said nostalgically, after Jim saw another vagina.

  “She would,” Jim said bitterly.

  Their second interviews with Dr. Fuller were very dampening. “Your Rorschach was frankly appalling,” he told Jim immediately. “You saw fifty-two vaginas. Sex is not that important. You’ve got it out of proportion. It’s just one of a number of things we humans do. You shouldn’t keep it on your mind so much.”

  “How can I help it?” Jim said. “My wife doesn’t like it with me.”

  “Your wife is immature,” Dr. Fuller said. “Let’s forget her for the moment. You have to take yourself in hand. An obsession with sex is not going to help you. Mature people try to balance their activities.”

  He told Jim that above all he should be firm with Patsy and realize that her feelings of repugnance were not personal but were the result of her own instability. They spent the last ten minutes of the hour discussing the vagaries of the Rice football team.

  Patsy’s interview was even less satisfactory.

  “You realize, don’t you, that your husband is very unhappy?” Dr. Fuller said.

  “We’re both unhappy,” she said.

  “Don’t you agree that it’s a wife’s duty to make her husband happy?” he asked, beaming at her.

  “I guess. I’m sure it is. I just don’t know how to do it.”

  “He doesn’t have much confidence right now,” Dr. Fuller went on. “Sexually he’s very insecure. He thinks you don’t like to sleep with him.”

  “I don’t, very much,” Patsy said meekly.

  “But, young lady,” Dr. Fuller said in his most jovial pediatrician’s voice, “you’re his wife. You’re grown up. Mature people can’t afford to be highly emotional about their duties. There are simply things we must do, for the good of our loved ones.”

  Patsy was at a loss. It was not what she had expected of psychiatry. Reading the books Jim had brought home had grown depressing, but they all did seem to assume that life was rather complicated. Dr. Fuller clearly didn’t think so. No one had ever made her feel more unequivocally guilty.

  “You and your husband have to take yourselves in hand,” he said. “You have to be adult. You’re both being rather childish. I have an idea you don’t go out enough. Go to some movies. Make him take you dancing. Enjoy yourselves. The more activities you share the better you’ll get along.”

  “Isn’t there something more specific wrong with us?” she asked.

  “Well, of course at the moment you’re both suffering from the consequences of your affair with the young man. I hope nothing like that will happen again. These things have no moral base, you realize. It’s no more than a form of escapism. What you must do is buckle down to reality.”

  Patsy reported that bit of advice to Lee the next day and Lee laughed long and feelingly. “My own triumph was forcing him to utter the word cunnilingus,” she said. “I think he would rather have bitten his tongue off. Go buy some smart clothes. It’s really more cheering than psychiatry.”

  Patsy went, but she had not been in the store more than five minutes when an awful depression came over her. She didn’t want to buy clothes. Why? Who for? What good would it do? When she got home Jim saw how depressed she was and asked her what was the matter.

  “Everything,” she said. “I almost spent a lot of money today. I’m too young for that. You’re supposed to save that for when you’re forty or so.”

  “Maybe we should buy things together,” Jim said. “Dr. Fuller said we should do things together.” The thought depressed them both. They could not even think of a pleasant way to spend money together. That night they went to their separate places of rest feeling very glum. Jim would have liked to ask her to come back to bed but held his peace. Patsy had begun to miss Hank. From time to time she was seized by a strong desire—she wanted to hear his voice, to feel his hands. The desire assailed her very strongly just after the lights were turned out. The room was silent in the way rooms are when they contain two waking people who are not in accord but who have grown wary of putting their discords into words. They might have talked, but neither could think of a way to start a conversation; and a conversation started on a bad note, in the wrong tone, could lead to anger, spleen, tears, and a tense sleepless night which neither of them wanted. What was hard to do was to have an after-dark conversation that might end nicely, with them feeling closer rather than more separated. It had grown almost impossible, and they played safe and stayed silent, each depressed. In only one week psychiatry had failed them, and neither of them knew where they might turn next.

  6

  JIM BEGAN TO WONDER if he could sleep with Clara Clark. Patsy had forbidden him the Hortons, so he took to spending his days around school looking for someone to talk to. Flap had launched into his dissertation and couldn’t be kept at coffee for more than fifteen minutes, so he wouldn’t do. Kenny Cambridge was sometimes someone to talk to, but he was lazy and generally lay around his apartment until the middle of the afternoon. He usually showed up just as it was time for Jim to go home. Most of the more intelligent older graduate students were writing dissertations and were as inaccessible as Flap, and none of the younger first-year people had yet emerged as interesting. That left Clara, and, as it happened, Clara was as much at loose ends as Jim.

  Both of them were beginning to have serious doubts about their scholarly futures, and their doubts made a convenient conversation topic. The first year of study had been easy. Reading was pleasant and scholarship rather interesting, in an esoteric way. Writing papers was good mental exercise. The university seemed a handleable scene, as Clara put it.

  But their summers changed all that. Clara had done nothing particularly unusual with hers; she had spent it in Santa Barbara, screwing and getting high. She had grown too old to surf, but she spent a l
ot of time on the beaches and had a satisfying summer. The difficulty was that during it she had ceased to feel very intellectual or very competitive or very interested in a degree and a job. Screwing and getting high were more her kind of scene.

  Jim had done none of either, but he had not been back in class long before he discovered that it wasn’t all as pleasant as it had been the year before. Taking pictures on the movie set had been pleasant. The work, the talk, and the people had all been amusing. In contrast the people in graduate school did not seem very vivid. Even Flap seemed pedantic in contrast to Sonny Shanks and the young Californians who had been with the crew. Clara made him slightly homesick for them, and the stories he told her about the crew made her slightly homesick for California. They began to spend a lot of time in the student center talking about it all. They were both taking a Victorian seminar and both had term papers hanging over their heads, tasks they were eager to avoid. One day Jim confessed his marital problems. It was hard to write about Victorian poetry with something like that on his back, he said. Clara was sympathetic. His marital problems seemed nothing unusual, but she too was unable to think of anything coherent or original to say about Victorian poetry. They had a mutual recognition over coffee: they didn’t really like writing about literature and couldn’t possibly do it professionally all their lives. Being companions in failure made them feel closer, and they went to the zoo.

  It almost turned out badly for Jim. No sooner were they inside than he ran into Peewee Raskin, returned again to his old job on the zoo train. He looked no older, no larger, and no more prosperous than he had the winter before. Peewee didn’t see them, but it gave Jim a start and made him realize that nothing was simple. Patsy could be there, for all he knew, or Emma and her boys could be there. He was nervous; Clara didn’t mind. She had merely gone along with the zoo suggestion to keep him with her. She would rather have gone to her place and to bed. She had always liked Jim’s looks. She felt fine and was very pleasant and vivacious. She knew that bed was where they were heading. If not today, tomorrow.

  Jim hesitated only one day, brooding about what would happen, wondering if he could get away with it. But he remembered Eleanor Guthrie and what had happened when he hesitated with her. He didn’t mean for that to happen with Clara. He didn’t feel as emotional about Clara as he had about Eleanor, but he still had no intention of passing her up. Patsy was so remote—he didn’t know if he could ever get her back. He was anxious to have somebody, and Clara seemed willing.

  Her willingness, when he finally tested it, was one of the surprises of his life. Patsy had taken a good deal of winning, when he had won her years before. Eleanor had taken more than he could manage. Clara took practically none. She was a girl who liked to screw. They went to her apartment the next day on the feeble pretense of getting a book she needed. There was an awkward moment or two, and then they seduced each other.

  “I’ve been keen on you for a year,” Clara said afterward, stretching. “I thought you were never going to get around to me. I was interested in you even before I had that thing with Hank. You’re just more my type.”

  Jim had never been convinced that he was more anybody’s type than anyone, but Clara soon showed him she meant it. Not only did she like to screw, she liked very much to screw with him. Her enthusiasm more than counterbalanced his guilt feelings. After all, Patsy had had hers, he had a right to his and even if that had not been so he would have had a hard time relinquishing Clara. She quickly convinced him of what he had always suspected, that his sex life with Patsy had been absurdly inhibited and constrained and that Patsy either didn’t like sex or didn’t like it with him in the way that she should. Clara liked it and liked it. She seemed to Jim an incredible example of sanity and health—just what a well-adjusted female should be. She was not obsessed about anything but was just a girl who liked what there was to do in bed better than what there was to do in other places. They grew fond of each other, in a light and unfrantic way, and it seemed to him that was an ideal way to relate to another person.

  Somewhat guiltily, he began to discuss Patsy with her, knowing full well that if Patsy ever found out he had she would never forgive him. He sketched out for Clara what seemed to him to be Patsy’s problems and Clara listened and said nice things about him. She was discreet and careful where Patsy was concerned. She never asked for more information than Jim was willing to give, and she never criticized Patsy sharply, though she sometimes made general criticisms that Jim thought very perceptive.

  Clara had always had a fine touch for what would go with a certain man and what wouldn’t. She had known Hank was going to be short-term even before she slept with him, and she made the most of the term. Jim was something else. She wasn’t hot to marry, but she had decided he just might be long-term. It didn’t bother her that he wasn’t very sure of himself; she was sure of him. He wasn’t any more ambitious than she was. He just needed someone who liked him and who wouldn’t give a damn whether he ever did anything or not. He needed someone who would enjoy drifting with him and not make him feel like a failure for drifting. She could hardly wait to get him in bed. She didn’t want him all twisted up with romantic longing; she wanted them to make it while they were friends, and to make it nicely enough that he wouldn’t need to worry for a while about whether he loved her or not. And she disarmed his suspicions by telling him as much.

  “I like friends who are attracted to me,” she said. “If I’m attracted to them, it’s great. I don’t know about marriage. Everyone who’s been married expects hang-ups. Like you. You expect hang-ups with me. But there doesn’t need to be any. Why should there be? This is a good way to spend time, isn’t it?”

  Jim thought it was, but then of course Clara didn’t have a wife and son to go home to. When he left her she took a walk or a nap or watched television the rest of the day. She had no tensions to cope with, and the next day when he came in she would be just like he had left her, pleasant, lovely, and very touchable. She liked being naked, and her usual indoor costume was a sweater and an old pair of corduroy pants, both of which she shed readily and put on again when he went to the door to leave.

  “I was made to live on a beach and not wear many clothes,” she said. “At least till I start having kids.”

  She fully expected to begin desiring children someday; she would not have dreamed of not having them. She just had not come to that point yet. It worried Jim a little. If she should turn up pregnant, explaining it to Patsy would turn his hair white. But Clara told him to forget it; she didn’t look forward to an abortion but would certainly get one rather than make trouble.

  Sometimes Jim grew paranoid. He had found out about Patsy through sheer accident. Mightn’t she find out about Clara the same way? Fortunately her apartment lay directly on his way to school. If surprised he could always be borrowing a book. He always carried a book for just such an emergency. But it didn’t allay his fears. He didn’t know what to do. He was not going to give up his afternoons with Clara, though; he knew that. He tried to put the thought of discovery out of his mind and he gave as little thought as possible to where it might all be leading. For a month he lived day by day and night by night.

  Clara didn’t push. She wanted what was going on to continue. She didn’t want him forced into any choice between her and Patsy—not then. She didn’t want any crisis at all. She wanted good afternoons, if she could get them. And she was not jealous of Patsy; she was mildly curious about her and mildly contemptuous of her. Such a great-looking girl, and so unnecessarily hung up. So far as she was concerned Patsy was lucky someone hadn’t taken Jim away from her years before. It hadn’t taken her two weeks to convince him he was a prize, and Patsy had left him in doubt on that score for years. Clara was really dubious about what went on in marriage. It amazed her that someone who liked to screw as much as Jim did could go for months without screwing his wife. It made no sense to her.

  It made no sense to Jim either, once he thought about it. Patsy had drawn into herself a
gain—she had closed in some way. She seemed younger, demure, and girlish. Sometimes he sat in bed at night and watched her making a maidenly bed on the couch and felt sorry for her. It seemed a pity. She might not know what fun she was missing. But then it occurred to him that she had slept with Hank Malory and had kept on doing it. He knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t have kept on if she hadn’t liked it. So what did that mean? He didn’t know. Clara liked it with him. It occurred to him that perhaps he had changed, that the Jim Patsy was averse to was an earlier Jim. Perhaps with Clara he had learned something that Patsy didn’t know he knew. Often he was tempted to approach her, to try once more to make love to her. Perhaps the change would communicate itself; perhaps it was not too late for her to start liking him. But he put it off, not quite convinced that it could be. And the more he screwed Clara, the easier it became to put off.

  And the more afternoons the two of them spent in bed, the less they gave a damn about Victorian poetry or the Ph.D. Bill Duffin and one or two of the other professors noted their slackening interest, but Bill Duffin was in the process of packing his books and had ceased to give a damn about Jim. Often in the afternoons, lying around, their hands on each other, Jim and Clara discussed in an idle, indefinite fashion what they might do if they both dropped out of school at the end of the semester.

  7

  ONE AFTERNOON, a week before Christmas holidays began, Hank called. It was an afternoon when Jim would normally have been in a seminar. So far as Patsy knew, he was in a seminar. Had she known he was at Clara’s she would have been extremely surprised, much more surprised than she was when she heard Hank’s voice. She had been expecting him to call, more or less, and had figured out that he would remember which afternoons were safe. Even so, the sound of his voice was a shock. It took her breath for a moment.