Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Well, it’s my old pal,” she said. “Where are you, old pal?”

  “Portales,” he said. “But not for long.”

  “Why not?”

  “No job.”

  “You mean they got someone else at the filling station?” Patsy said. “How inconsiderate. If only you wouldn’t keep running off to Houston to try and be an intellectual. Not only do you get in trouble with people’s wives, but you lose your niche.”

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “As well as I deserve to be.”

  “Jim?”

  “Sort of distant. Okay.”

  They both fell silent, struck by a feeling of helplessness. Neither of them wanted to talk about the present, and the past was unmanageable in the few minutes they felt they had. Both started at once to try and locate the future. It was easier for Hank. He had to get a job. He was thinking of working in Lubbock and enrolling at Texas Tech for the spring semester.

  “Aha,” she said. “Still trying to be an intellectual. What innocent wife will you ruin there?”

  “I’ll be too depressed to ruin anyone,” he said.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “There must be innocents, even in Lubbock. One of them will entice you, probably.”

  “You can’t see them for the sand,” he said. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” she said, unable to deny it. At the end of the conversation he told her he loved her. She didn’t doubt it, but both of them had trouble believing that the feeling would ever again do them any good. The feeling was genuine, but it was useless, and after Patsy hung up she grew deeply depressed. What good was it? What good had it been? Her depression went below tears. She had wanted him to call but couldn’t help wishing he hadn’t. The silence had been easier to handle. His voice was enough to stir her memory, to make her yearn for what she couldn’t have. Yearning was no fun. It was better simply to be blank.

  The call echoed through her mind that evening and all the next day. She was very troubled, could not think, could not assemble herself. Her mind was either entirely vacant or else distant from the rest of her. But that evening the depression lifted. It lifted as she was putting Davey to bed. At bedtime they played a little game of peekaboo, with Davey holding on to the headboard of his bed and bobbing up and down. Patsy began playing rather mechanically—it was simply part of the bedtime ritual—but Davey was full of zest and looked particularly impish, and his merriment reached her. It lifted her out of her gloom and she began to play for real. They played too long, overexciting Davey. He was a long time going to sleep.

  Patsy went in and washed her hair. She had been as conscious of her depression as if it had been a headache, and she was just as conscious that it was gone. Things seemed very clear, and much simpler than they had. It had been real, whatever she had had with Hank, absolutely real. As she massaged her scalp she thought of it without regret for the first time. It was something she would not have wanted to miss—it had been too good. But still, it was over. He was far away and would never be more than an occasional voice again. She had somehow made a decision, and it had been to stay with Jim and Davey. So it was time she stopped mooning, stopped feeling sorry for herself, stopped being childish. If she was going to stay she might as well really play, as she had with Davey. It had worked with him and it might work with Jim, if she forced herself to go through the mechanics.

  Later, watching Jim, who was reading in bed, she began to feel sympathetic to him and forgave him for the misuse of a few weeks before. How could he have been expected to know better? He had probably been desperate. It had been a long time since she had really been accommodating, and he had known she had accommodated someone else. How could he have been blamed? Since then he had been kind and patient. He hadn’t even asked her to come back to bed. She had really been selfish long enough. If she was going to stay married it was time she started thinking of him. They had a new house to move into, and Christmas was coming. They couldn’t sleep separately at her parents’ house; such a clear hint that something was wrong would spoil her mother’s whole Christmas. It was time to start trying again.

  She sat in her rocking chair until her hair was dry. Jim had quit reading and was watching the Tonight show. She went over and sat on the bed and, when he looked up, asked if he wanted to make love. It sounded strange to her. She had never asked in that way before, but she was afraid that after what she had said the other night he would ignore any other kind of invitation.

  Jim was startled. He had been contentedly watching the show, but it didn’t occur to him to say no to Patsy’s question. He was disconcerted, though. He had made love to Clara that afternoon and for a moment, absurd though he knew it was, he was fearful that the fact would somehow reveal itself. Patsy lifted her gown off over her head and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, thoughtful. He was struck by how much slimmer she was than Clara; Clara was a strongly built girl. “Seen enough?” she asked, nodding toward the TV, and when he nodded she went over and bent to turn it off. He saw the hang of her breasts before the TV darkened.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so silly,” she said, coming back to the bed.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Jim said, hugging her rather awkwardly, her cool breasts against his arms.

  But it proved far from okay. Patsy had made a decision and acted on it in good faith, but her decision had caught them both cold. It was, in its way, the equivalent of Jim’s earlier efforts to make them work through sheer will, and it failed as miserably. They tried to make love on sympathy—neither of them had any hunger. They moved together, but mechanically; they went nowhere. Neither came or even came close to coming. After a while they simply stopped and lay side by side.

  “Well, I guess it’s back to the couch,” she said finally.

  “The living-room couch or the psychiatrist’s couch?” he asked, very glum.

  “Either one,” she said. “Both, maybe. Hell. I guess I am frigid. It’s finally come true.”

  Jim didn’t say anything. He had no answers, but he was more tired than she was and soon went to sleep. After a while Patsy got up and put on her gown and went back to the couch.

  The memory of that attempt stayed in Jim’s mind for days and gradually began to swell. It began to seem a worse failure than it had been, more awkward, more awful, more final. He could conceive of no way to come back from it, and for the first time began to entertain the notion that he and Patsy could not go on living together. The idea, like most of his ideas, soon ran away with him, and he quickly came to think of his marriage as something impossible. It was not that he had stopped caring for Patsy. He knew that he cared about her. He still wanted her sexually, for that matter. She still turned him on. But she was simply too difficult and he didn’t want the difficulties any longer. He didn’t know why she had slept with Hank. Probably in time she would start sleeping with someone else. He could not handle her emotions. They were either so vague as to be undetectable or so violent that they unnerved him. He didn’t know what to do about her sexually. There seemed to be no meeting ground. For him she was virtually all difficulty.

  And with Clara there were no difficulties. She was easy for him in every way. He was beginning, at moments, to feel that he loved her, and he had come to depend on her, not just for sex but for intimacy. He and Patsy had no intimacy any longer, only a kind of politeness. It dissatisfied them both, but it seemed the best they could do. Clara became both mistress and confidante. He began to talk of leaving Patsy. Clara said she thought it would be best for both of them, but she let him feel his way slowly toward the decision. She didn’t push, but she did tell him she wouldn’t see any other man until he made up his mind. She hadn’t been seeing other men, anyway, but the fact that she stated it made a difference. Jim was pleased; to have gained an exclusive purchase on someone as experienced as Clara made him feel better about himself.

  He found at home that his sense of the impossibility of it going on was swelling inside him, just as his memory of their bad experien
ces had swelled. Every night he wanted to talk about it, have it out in the open; but he hated the thought of the night that would buy them, and so long as Patsy was quiet and nominally content he let it ride.

  Once or twice Clara said quietly that she wished he were free. “You could drive me home for Christmas,” she said. “I could show you some of California.”

  “I wish I were too,” he said.

  That night he wished it more; the calm at home broke down. He had been supposed to see a man about some painting they were going to have done on the new house, and he had put it off. It was the third time he had put it off; having painting done had simply ceased to interest him. But it made Patsy furious: all she wanted him to do was to get an estimate on how much it would cost.

  “Look,” she said, “if you don’t want to do that, I’ll do it. I would have done it already if you hadn’t told me three times you’d be glad to take care of it. Why don’t you take care of it? What have you got to do that’s so important you can’t take thirty minutes to go see a painter?”

  “I was working on my term paper,” Jim said, but it was a miserable lie, the more miserable because he had done nothing at all about his term paper other than decide vaguely to write on Arthur Hugh Clough. He was well aware that the fact would soon come out and that he would have the task of explaining why he had collapsed academically in the course of one semester. Either that or he was going to have to work terribly hard for a month, and he knew he wasn’t going to do that. He had no good defense and sat silent while Patsy poured out her spleen. Finally she exhausted it and stopped, ashamed of herself. Such minor failings had been characteristic of Jim ever since she had known him and she didn’t like herself any better for blasting him so.

  Jim felt hopeless. He was on the verge of confessing all and telling her they ought to call it quits. The idea of leaving, of driving Clara to California, seemed marvelous to him, a bold but on the whole rational way out. He had to make a break. He and Patsy would only go on until they broke each other down. And if he sent Clara to California alone she might find another man, she might not come back, she might conclude that he would never have the nerve to leave Patsy. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want to let things cool between them. He had let things cool too long with Patsy and had discovered what a mistake it had been.

  Yet he couldn’t quite come out of it. He quailed at the thought of what it might do to Patsy. He really didn’t know if it would crush her or make her murderous. He put it off a day and the next evening Patsy accidentally opened it all up.

  She had been brooding about sex and had convinced herself that she had all but destroyed Jim, in that way. She felt she had to do something to reverse the trend and to make it up. What she had done the last time had been the wrong way to try. She hated talking about it, but he wasn’t doing anything about it and she felt it was entirely her fault that he wasn’t. That night she went to the bed and tried to tell him what she thought might help.

  “Look,” she said, “I was wrong the last time. I sort of decided it in my head. I know I’ve been awful and I’m not mad at you now. You don’t have to wait for me to raise a flag or anything. I’m not going to knife you if you touch me.”

  Jim looked up at her. He saw that she was trying to be nice, but it irritated him that she took the tone that she took. It annoyed him that she should think he needed telling what to do in regard to sex. It seemed to him that she was the one who needed telling.

  “I should just let it come naturally, hum?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, not meaning it. There was an edge in his tone that cut her and she knew if he should want to let it come naturally right then it would affect her as badly as it had the last time. But she let the point stand and went to the kitchen to do the dishes. When she returned she felt okay again, but Jim didn’t. The more he thought about it the more presumptuous her remarks seemed, and the more he resented them. Not only did she imply that she needed help, but she had also implied that he had been leaving her alone because he was scared of her. He longed to point out that she was not necessarily the most wantable female in the world, that he knew another who was a great deal more fun in bed. But he controlled himself to the extent of being oblique.

  “You know, I think you gave up on psychiatry too soon,” he said. “There must be more intelligent psychiatrists than Dr. Fuller. It wouldn’t hurt you to try one more.”

  Patsy was at her dresser. She turned and looked at him. She caught the drift of the insinuation. They were both so honed by tension that obliquities were seldom missed. Patsy could have caught his meaning if she had had to lip read.

  “What did I say to make you think that?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I just don’t think you understand yourself.”

  “You mean sexually?”

  “That way and other ways.”

  “But you’re not talking about the other ways,” she said, facing him. “Why don’t you quit hinting? Do you think I’m Lesbian, or what?”

  Jim was silent. He had said all he wanted to say.

  “After all,” she said, “you’re the one who saw fifty-two vaginas. Why don’t you go to another psychiatrist? I saw perfectly normal things.”

  “You didn’t see any penises, did you?” he asked.

  The hostility between them was so great for a moment that if they had been armed with guns one or both would have fired. But they had only words to fire.

  “No, but so what?” she said, shrugging. “I never particularly liked to look at them. If looking at vaginas is what you really like to do you can look at mine any time.”

  Jim got up without another word and went to the closet and got his suitcase. He opened it across the bed and began to pack. He was too angry to talk.

  “Okay, go,” Patsy said. She hadn’t moved.

  “I didn’t ask your permission to sleep with you and I don’t need your permission to go,” he said.

  “Where are you planning on going?”

  “To a friend’s place.”

  “You’re not going to the Hortons’,” she said. “I won’t have that.”

  “I wasn’t planning on going to the Hortons’,” he said. “Just shut up.”

  “Well, that leaves Kenny. Shall I call and tell him you’re coming?”

  Even in his anger he had some inclination to spare her, but it vanished. “I’m going to a girl friend’s,” he said. “Someone who knows I like to do more than look.”

  It was a bolt quite from the blue. She had had no suspicion at all. Her first thought was Lee Duffin. She had the awful certainty that Lee had silently fulfilled her old prophecy, and just as she was getting to like her for a friend. She waited for Jim to say, “I’m sleeping with Lee.”

  “I’m probably going to go away with Clara,” he said instead.

  Patsy was stunned. If he had said Lee she might have screamed. As it was she looked at him and sat down in the rocking chair, her mouth trembling. Clara. She had had them both.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I better see some more doctors. I must have a lot to learn.”

  “If you hadn’t been so goddamned sure all along that you didn’t, it would never have happened,” he said.

  “When was I ever sure of anything?” she asked, beginning to cry.

  “Look, I’m going,” he said. “There’s no point in us trying any longer. Don’t sit there crying and looking tragic all night. I’ll probably come by tomorrow and get some of the books.”

  She looked at the bookshelves rather than at him. “You better get them tonight,” she said. “Take the car full. Anything you leave here may be ashes in the morning.”

  “Oh, Patsy, stop talking that way,” he said. “Don’t be so melodramatic.”

  “You don’t want to talk to me,” she said. “Go on. If you hear a fire engine in the next few minutes you can chalk it all up to melodrama. Is she unmelodramatic?”

  “I’ll be by tomorrow,” he said and left, just ahead of Patsy’s rage. When it ended
most of his books were in a great pile on the floor and Davey was awake and crying. Patsy was so choked with tears that she couldn’t comfort him very well; she rocked him and rocked him and finally he went back to sleep and she sat down on the floor and straightened out the books she had thrown in a pile. There was no point in ruining them. Then she got in bed, knowing she couldn’t sleep, that she had no recourse but to lie alone thinking about it. She couldn’t call Hank; she would only get his aunt. Emma was the only possible person, and she wasn’t ready to call Emma.

  Once she calmed down a little she regretted bitterly that she had let Jim leave so abruptly. She knew nothing really, and it was a time when knowing particulars might have helped. As it was, she had a statement in a void: “I’m probably going to go away with Clara.” Going away where? How long had it been going on? Had he been sleeping with her ever since Hank stopped? Or had she driven him to it recently by her own resistance? Could she blame him or must it be all her fault?

  She was not aware that she slept at all, but she was aware, time after time, of jerking awake with it all on her mind, of turning one way and then another, trying to quit thinking about it. But the one fact she knew was that he was with Clara, and that probably they were talking about her, and it was not a fact that would let her sleep. If he had stayed, fought with her, wanted to forgive and be forgiven, that would have been one thing. But he left and let her know where he was going and that was different. It hurt all night.

  Next morning, feeding Davey, it occurred to her that the night had paid her back for the one he spent when she had stopped at Hank’s. He had been deliberate and she hadn’t, but it amounted to the same quality of pain. Her hand was shaky with the spoon. The fact that they were even did not strike her as a cause for optimism. They were even, but they were also quits.