Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  She found the latter with no real difficulty, but when she had carried her suitcase to a phone she found she could not call Jim. A course of action that had once been natural had become impossible. She had already put in her dime, but she could not imagine what she would say if she got Clara, so she got her dime back instead and stood for several minutes in a state of tense dejection. The longer she stood by the phone the less clear she felt about everything.

  Finally she wrestled her suitcase into a locker and in a kind of torpor wandered into the main terminal and stood in a travelers’ shop looking at overpriced stuffed animals for Davey. She felt like going back to Texas and had to exert an effort of will to go check on flights to San Francisco, thinking she might as well go on there. But everybody wanted to go to San Francisco, it seemed. The length of the waiting line dejected her still more and in order to give it time to shrink she called Joe Percy. The sound of his voice saying hello was one of the most welcome sounds she had ever heard. It was amazing that one of the two people she knew in the whole city should be at home when she called. It was very cheering.

  “Help,” she said. “Help, help, help. I’ve come to be a burden.”

  “Why, Patsy Carpenter,” Joe said, with no surprise. “I knew you’d call if I sat by the phone long enough. I hope you’ve come to see me and not that fugitive husband of yours.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He buzzed me about a job. It was about the time Sonny got killed. I haven’t heard from him since, but I assume if you’re here he must be too.”

  “He’s in someplace called Altadena. It’s a long story. Could you come and get me?”

  “Not there,” Joe said. “It would take hours. What you should do is take a limo to the Ambassador. I’ll meet you there.”

  “A what?”

  “Limousine. And please plan to stay here. I have a nice guest room.”

  “Okay,” she said, relieved. “Gee, I’m in Hollywood.”

  “No, you’re at the airport,” he said. “Hollywood is another country.”

  The fact of having found Joe cheered her up and she found her limo and squeezed in between two stone-silent businessmen. The lights and the speed and the heavy enclosing presences of the businessmen lulled her again; she felt already that she had slipped out of the normal stream of time and event. Anything was apt to happen. She rather expected the limousine to run all night through the freeways, for she had no idea how distant the hotel might be and the traffic around them was so fast and thick it was hard to imagine really getting out of it.

  But when she arrived at the Ambassador, Joe Percy was there, having a conversation with one of the doormen. He came over and hugged her, and the businessmen hurrying to register bumped them with their briefcases.

  A few hours later they were at his house and Patsy was drunk. Joe was apologetic, because he had helped her get drunk without meaning to. They had eaten at a quiet restaurant and he had had a natural number of drinks. Patsy was telling her story and had seemed to want a few drinks too, and he had let her have them, assuming she knew her capacity. When they finished eating and he saw she couldn’t walk straight he realized she had been drinking out of relief, or out of distress, and got her to his house, hoping she wouldn’t get sick. She was pale, and had cried a fair amount, and was talking around and around the same questions, which were when and how to give up a person one was married to, and how to know if a person one loved or liked was a good bet to marry. On the latter point Joe had no advice, but he did make it clear that he thought the time had come for her to give up on Jim. Patsy agreed, and soon came back to the question again, a little paler and a little sicker. Joe gauged it beautifully and got her to the bathroom just when she needed to be there. Then he put her to bed.

  She slept, but not well. She didn’t want to have got drunk. Irritation with her own stupidity kept her awake. She felt too bad to move. She heard the sound of television from the other room, just loud enough that she could not stop hearing it and go to sleep. When she did finally sleep she had a vague fitful dream involving Hank and Roger’s ranch house. She felt weak and wretched when morning came, but was glad, nonetheless, that the night was over.

  Joe Percy insisted that she get up and sit with him while he breakfasted. He made himself a good breakfast, but the sight of it did not please her. She sat in a chair across from him and sipped a little orange juice.

  “I look awful,” she said. “It’s nothing to how I feel, though.”

  “You look like you were drunk last night,” he said. “I didn’t know you couldn’t drink or I would have watched you better.”

  “I can’t do anything like that,” she said. “I’m unsuited to all but the most basic wickedness. Even my milkshakes have to be vanilla.”

  “About noon you’ll feel like living again,” he said.

  “But I was supposed to do things! I was going to be brisk today. I was going to clear that girl out of Jim’s life and we were going to San Francisco to rescue my little sister from a bad end. That was the general plan.”

  “You really want him back? I never thought you two were all that interested in one another.”

  “We must have been at one time. We got married, didn’t we?”

  Joe shrugged. He was wearing a light green pullover sweater and looked in top spirits.

  “Maybe you stopped being, then.”

  “I was raised not to accept reasons like that.”

  Joe shrugged again. “Screw raisings,” he said. “You’ve got fifty-odd years to live.”

  “I agree,” Patsy said. “I agree completely.” There were many windows in his house, some looking out on the bare brown shoulders of the Hollywood hills, but most looking out on the houses beyond and below. It seemed to be a sunny day, but the white smog diluted the sunlight and made it paler. The paleness made the outside look too cool and rather uninviting. She felt chilly even in her bathrobe.

  “I know just the thing for you,” Joe said, “but unfortunately it will have to wait until lunch.”

  “If it involves much action on my part it had better wait until lunch tomorrow.”

  “No, today. You stay here and take it easy while I go work awhile.”

  “What are you creating?”

  “A TV script about a hippie who becomes a cop. It’s a shitty idea, but who knows?”

  He left and she devoted the morning to recovery, most of it spent in the comfortable guest-room bed watching the hills outside her window become browner and more distinct as the sun burned through the smog. She read the L.A. Times and an issue of Variety and recovered to the point of wanting coffee. She made some and wandered around the living room looking at Joe’s books and magazines. Most of the books in his bookcases were upside down for some reason, but a fair number of them were interesting books, once they were turned over.

  On impulse she went and dialed Jim’s number and let it ring seven times, her heart pounding. Then she decided she was silly and took a hot bath. Since her general plan had been destroyed, she felt at a loss. She had no secondary plan, but her weak feeling went away, at least. She had not really drunk so much. When Joe came back she felt somewhat like seeing the town. They climbed in his Morgan and he took her at once to a mod dress shop on the Sunset Strip and insisted that she buy herself a wild dress. As he had predicted, it was just the thing for her spirits. She bought a short bright yellow dress, with no back at all, wondering all the while what possible occasion she could have to wear it. The shop was full of teenage girls, their hair as long and as beautifully kept as the manes of show ponies, and they glanced at her from time to time with a certain hostility, as if she were far too old to be in their dress shop. Joe Percy they regarded with frank contempt, and he was relieved when Patsy finished and they could leave.

  “Those kids looked at me as if I embodied the System,” he said. “Imagine it. Me embodying the System.”

  “You embody more of it than they do,” Patsy said. They had lunch in a large dark-paneled r
estaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, and she had a chance to observe her escort closely. The closer she looked, the more she was inclined to feel that his high spirits were superficial. He looked tired. It made her feel odd, for she had just begun to feel good again. She had the strange feeling that she had somehow passed him her sorrow.

  “Will the movie you made with Sonny ever be released?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Joe said. “If it was ready now, it could be, but they’re still screwing around with it. Now that he’s dead and forgotten it would bomb. It makes a good tax write-off.”

  “He’s not entirely forgotten,” Patsy said. “I remember him.”

  “Me too,” Joe said. “For a nut he was a good poker player.”

  The Boulevard was warm and sunny when they went outside, and they walked a bit. “I want to go to Altadena,” Patsy said.

  “Sucker.”

  “I know.”

  “IBM is just over on Wilshire. It’s a lot closer.”

  “No, Altadena.”

  He got her a cab and went back to work, and Patsy rode with a silent Latin cabbie down the Hollywood freeway, out the Pasadena freeway, beneath slopes and tall brown palms, and then north up a long street almost to the foot of a mountain. When the mountain was very close the driver turned off and parked beside a vast apartment building. The apartments were terraced and spread over a whole block, sunk into the gentle slope that spread back toward Los Angeles. She didn’t want to be stranded in Altadena and asked the driver to wait. There were no cars at all in the empty street, and it was strange that it should be so empty. All the cars were back where she had come from, in L.A. The sidewalks that ran into the maze of apartments were just as deserted as the streets. It was almost frightening. She encountered an old lady in shorts and sneakers walking a poodle. The old lady was taken aback. “We don’t live here,” she said. “We’re just walking through.”

  “It seems nice,” Patsy said, for the old lady was a bit belligerent and seemed to expect a reply.

  “It’s not fit to live in, if you’re lookin’,” she said. “They won’t take you if you’re over fifty, and they won’t take no children and they won’t take no pets. We live down the street. Homosexuals everywhere too.” With that she went on, tugging the poodle away from a faucet he was licking.

  Patsy went on too, and almost immediately encountered two well-tanned young men. They were having a lovers’ quarrel by one of the swimming pools and they looked up as she passed and for a moment both focused their hostility on her. They didn’t speak, but it frightened her. She had seldom run into faces that said so clearly that they disliked her and resented not only her presence near their swimming pool but her very existence as well. She felt they might have grabbed her and drowned her if she had dared to speak.

  When she found Jim’s apartment all she did was stand in front of it a few minutes feeling silly. It was curtained, and though she peeped as best she could all she could see was the end of a sofa with some newspapers piled on it. The curtains were off-white and the sofa brown. Very quietly, as if she were a spy, she tried the door, but it was locked. The apartment, like all the others, was done in a rough unpainted shingle, vaguely English. There was really nothing more to do. She could not imagine what kind of lives Jim and Clara led, inside the door, and she found that she had little curiosity and even less possessiveness in regard to Jim. She had just wanted to see the place, and was not sure she would have rung the doorbell even if she had known he was there and alone. She walked back through the winding sidewalks, among the heavy glossy shrubs, not even bothering to avoid the pool. The young men had settled their quarrel and were stretched out side by side, both on their backs, both in heavy sunglasses, taking the sun. Neither moved a muscle when she walked by; the only sound was the sound of her heels. She would not have supposed it could be so silent anywhere in L.A. The cab driver was listening to Mexican music on his radio and seemed displeased that she was back. She told him to take her to the IBM building on Wilshire Boulevard.

  The one thing she felt certain about was that she no longer had any inclination for a big scene about Clara Clark. Too much time had passed. The issues had grown vague, and her feelings had grown vague also. All she wanted in that regard was to avoid Clara completely. But Jim was different. Avoiding him completely did not seem right. The best plan that came to mind was to wait outside his office building and surprise him when he got off work. Once she got to Wilshire and scrutinized the building, curiosity began to nibble at her. Perhaps, as Joe suggested, she wasn’t very interested in Jim, but she was nonetheless curious to see what he looked like and who he had become. She tried to project the man she had known who had sat around for two years fiddling with cameras and scholarship into the IBM building, and it was hard. She walked down Wilshire for almost a mile and sat for a while in an Orange Julius bar. The men there were talking about the Lakers, all except two hippies. The hippies of L.A. had fantastic hair; it made her realize what an inferior breed of hippie she had been exposed to in Texas.

  The elevators were busy when Patsy went in, but soon they became even busier. Every time one reached the ground floor a score of young men and women stepped out and hurried toward the street. The building began to empty itself of its hundreds, of its thousands. At first Patsy watched each elevator load intensely, expecting Jim to be in each one. She was very nervous. But by the time twenty elevator loads of people had poured out before her eyes her nervousness had changed to confusion and then to a kind of light discouragement that was akin to her feeling of silliness as she stood in front of the apartment in Altadena. She felt like she didn’t know what she was doing. It was hard to believe that Jim, any Jim she knew, would come out of one of the elevators. All the young men looked rather alike, their suits gray or blue or brown. Almost in unison, when the elevators opened, they began to fish sunglasses from their pockets and put them on. Those who didn’t already had them on. And the elevators kept coming, emptying hundreds of nice-looking young men, some with their hair short, some with their hair longish; and girls with their hair longish, in short skirts and colored stockings, all heading for the street. After ten or fifteen minutes Patsy’s discouragement deepened. It occurred to her that in such a throng she might not notice Jim, or might not recognize him. His face could be turned the wrong way. Several times she had thought she had seen him, only to find that it was merely someone who resembled him slightly. It occurred to her that she might have missed him already. He might have passed within twenty feet, wearing sunglasses and a suit she wouldn’t recognize. Finally she simply let go of it, the whole plan, the whole pursuit, stepped into the departing rush and was back on Wilshire Boulevard, no more enlightened than when she went in. With some difficulty she got a cab and went to Joe Percy’s. He was there having a martini. Patsy took some sherry and listened meekly as Joe told her she was going about things in a very silly way.

  “This is the age of appointments,” he said. “You use the phone. Doctors, lawyers, ex-husbands, it doesn’t matter. Wait an hour and a half and call him.”

  “Okay,” she said listlessly.

  “Look,” he said. “Make up your mind. Are you here to rescue your sister or to get your husband back. If it’s your sister, I can help you. I’ve got the whole weekend, and I know San Francisco. Jim probably doesn’t.”

  She shook her head, genuinely uncertain. “I don’t much want him back. It’s just so messy, being married in absentia. I guess I think he ought to do something about it, if he wants us to be together again.”

  She dialed Altadena, but no one was there. “Let’s do something wild to take my mind off it,” she said. “Why don’t you take me dancing? We could go to the Whiskey Au Go-Go or someplace extremely wild and I could wear that dress you bought me.”

  Joe frowned. “Aren’t I supposed to wear it?” she asked.

  “I was frowning at the thought of the Whiskey Au Go-Go,” he said. “I think it’s sort of had its hour. But we can go see.”

  The dress was
absolutely backless and she had no bra she could wear with it, which made her feel both shy and very daring. She smiled at the thought of what her mother would think if she knew that, instead of rescuing Miri, she was going off to a night club wearing no bra. Joe praised her lavishly and she blushed.

  “My goodness, I feel odd,” she said. “I’m not sure I could wear it if I were going with anyone but you.”

  Joe, seeing her blush, was all the more delighted with his purchase. She looked a girl again, looked like she had in Phoenix the night they met—only something had been added.

  “Look, it’s six hours too early to do anything,” he said. “Why don’t I show you a little of the town.”

  He did, and Patsy loved it. They went in the Morgan and her hair blew wildly. They went to Santa Monica and drove along the beach. Then he took her up the Miracle Mile and then to the Beverly Hills shopping center, where they got out and walked awhile. As they were passing a drugstore a dark beautiful woman came out adjusting her sunglasses. She was dressed in white, and she said hello to Joe, who said hello in return. “Who was that?” Patsy asked, feeling she ought to remember.

  “Dolores Del Rio,” Joe said, taking her arm. She was still shy about her dress, though no one seemed to pay her the slightest mind.

  As it grew dark he drove her into the hills and gave her a view of the lights of Los Angeles. Still early, they went to the Go-Go and danced amid a thin motley crowd of youngsters. Though colorfully dressed, most of them looked stoned, and the looks on their faces didn’t fit with the frenetic music. Patsy had never danced without a bra and could not get over being self-conscious about the movement of her breasts. A young man in a red shirt open to the navel, with a black armband on one arm, kept ogling her, though he was with a tall lovely girl who looked part Indian and part Negro. Patsy felt constrained and they soon left.