Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “No, I don’t want to.”

  “Would you marry him if you could?”

  “I don’t want to marry anybody. It’s stupid to get married.”

  “Oh? Why?” Pronouncements about marriage by someone who had never been married had come to amuse her.

  “Nobody loves anybody very long.”

  “Don’t be so cynical. I’m sure people do. You’re too young to be cynical.”

  “I’m not so young,” Miri snapped. “You didn’t love Jim long, did you, and he was nice. You don’t love Hank any more, either.”

  “I’m not sure I ever loved him,” she said.

  “Well, there’s no point in having a lover if he’s not around so you can fuck,” Miri said dogmatically.

  Patsy had no answer to that. Miri picked up one of Davey’s socks; he was always losing them. She stretched it and smoothed it across her knee.

  “Stone’s already forgotten me,” she said and then added in a different, apologetic tone, “He doesn’t have a very good memory,” as if it were his housekey he was prone to forget.

  “Was it that one-sided?”

  Miri got up and went upstairs to her room without answering the question, and Patsy never asked about Stone again. When it came time to decide upon a last name for the baby, Stone was not considered. They talked it over among themselves—Miri, Patsy, and Juanita, with Emma an occasional consultant. The phone book stayed on the kitchen table for a month. Often, while Patsy idled over lunch, or drank iced tea or read magazines with her feet propped on the table, Miri, who would be just up and having breakfast pushed at her by Juanita, would read out names and the three of them would discuss their qualities. They also discussed stories for Jeanette and Garland to tell their friends. Miri was resistant on that point; she didn’t want to tell any lies at all.

  “Look, don’t be so selfish,” Patsy said. “Think of them a little. It’s terrible for them. The point is that any good story we make up about it they’ll come to believe, and it will be better for them to believe a sort of decent lie that they can tell their friends. It’s awful for people like Momma and Daddy not to have something reasonably acceptable to tell their friends.”

  “Okay,” Miri said finally. “You make it up.”

  Patsy had been putting them off by telling them that Miri simply wouldn’t talk about it. Finally what she told them was that Miri had been engaged and had gotten pregnant just as she and the boy found they weren’t right for marriage. She invented a fictional boy named Raymond Hammett, amalgamating the name one night when Kenny Cambridge, a detective-story buff, was haranguing them about the respective merits of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Miri listened almost with awe as Patsy gave their parents, via the telephone, a description of young Mr. Hammett, making him seem a highly desirable, proper, respectable, but confused and impetuous young man. She also made them promise to leave him strictly alone and told them he was paying all bills and acquitting himself respectably, under the circumstances.

  “How was that?” Patsy asked when she finished.

  “Great, except I’d never screw anyone like that,” Miri said. “Also you forgot to tell them he was a spade.”

  “Well, according to you, maybe he wasn’t,” Patsy said. “We’ll cross that bridge when and if we come to it.”

  From then on, when they were in good moods, they sat around and made up stories about Raymond Hammett. Miri confused the issue by referring to him as Dashiell Chandler, or, as she usually put it, “my former lover, Dashiell Chandler.” Eventually even Juanita came to believe someone named Raymond was the father. They were particularly prone to talking about Raymond Hammett-Dashiell Chandler when Kenny was around. He took detective writing as seriously as he had once taken Augustine Birrell and felt that the girls were being a little too frivolous. It irked him too that neither of them would read The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep or anything else he wanted them to read. He and Miri did agree on records, though, and spent hours and hours discussing Bob Dylan, whom they both idolized. They went to see his movie four times.

  For a time Patsy had a feeling that Miri and Kenny were going to get thick, and they might have had not Kenny introduced her around so much. One of the people he introduced her to was a boy named Eric Flanigan, and within a week Eric became her accepted boy friend. He was a first-year graduate student from Menlo Park, California, and he and Miri had an immediate meeting point in that they were both nostalgic for the Bay Area generally. Patsy liked Eric almost as much as Miri did and soon he was a regular feature at supper. He was slightly unhappy in graduate school and spent his free afternoons playing tennis, at which he was quite good. Often Miri would go to the court and meet him and walk him to Dunstan Street. He would come in in his tennis clothes and gratefully consume quantities of Patsy’s food while Miri chattered. He was a good-looking boy, blond and loose, with a short beard—one of those young Californians who, it seemed to Patsy, must almost constitute a new breed, they were so healthy and so alike. For Eric was a sort of shorter Barry, shy, immediately friendly, bright, but so quiet it took weeks for his brightness to show itself. He was so relaxed and at home with himself physically that it was a comfort to have him around. He was charming to watch with Miri, because she pecked and chattered and sniped at him and he took it so quietly that it was hard to decide whether he was afraid of her or merely tolerant. Eric liked Patsy’s house better than his own apartment, and he spent most of his evenings there. He was having difficulties with his eighteenth-century seminar and would sit on the floor frowning mildly, usually still in his tennis shorts, reading Collins and Gray and the Whartons while Miri tussled with Davey if he was still up, or listened to records or watched TV if he wasn’t. Patsy generally lay in splendor on her couch, wearing a long green caftan and watching TV or arguing with Miri or debating with Eric the merits of the various writers he was reading. She had debated most of them with Hank the year before. Eric, like Flap, was in awe of Jim’s scholarly library, though it had not grown by one book since Jim had left.

  Sometimes the sight of Eric and Miri sitting on the floor together, both of them pleasant and rather placid, made Patsy feel that even the five years that separated them was a long gap in generation. They were so beautiful as they were, in the present, that it bothered her a little when she tried to project them a future. Miri had simply stepped aside, stepped out of the groove of her upbringing, and she was not going to go back.

  Once when Jeanette came they tried to buy her clothes, thinking a lot of new clothes might cheer her up. Miri was not resentful, she was just openly bored. She was not interested in clothes, maternity or otherwise. She wore jeans and sweatshirts, or jeans and blouses, or a cheap cotton dress she had bought herself one day. She was not interested in money, either. Patsy was a little embarrassed about it and told Miri to please ask when she needed some, and Miri did. She seldom asked for more than twenty dollars a week, and only that much when she wanted to buy records. Kenny and Eric gave her pot, and Patsy gave her food. Patsy did not see her changing back, going back to a life where one dressed up, went to classes, got married. They talked about her getting into Rice, and she didn’t want to, though sociology interested her and she did consider sitting in on an urban problems seminar.

  Patsy was glad to see Eric come along, for it was clear that Eric cared about Miri, and whatever her future, she had ceased to be unhappy with her present. And Eric, for all his easygoingness, was not idle or indifferent or lazy. When he got excited he got tremendously excited; he talked, he flushed, he moved. Sometimes Patsy and Miri would carry Davey over to the tennis courts and sit on the grass in the spring sun watching Eric play. He was not overserious about his tennis, but he played hard, with lots of ardor and considerable grace, and it was pleasant to sit on the green spring grass and watch.

  Within two weeks Eric and Miri became such solid chums that Patsy rather regretted the invention of Raymond Hammett. Miri’s pregnancy seemed no deterrent to Eric, and Miri was very delighted with him.
She couldn’t keep her hands off him, walked home from the tennis courts with her arm around him, and often used him as a pillow when they were stretched out on the floor. Her affection often embarrassed Eric, but it was a becoming embarrassment. He looked at once excited and shy. It came to be the rule that two or three nights a week they would wander off together to the library and then spend the night at his apartment, wandering back together the next morning when it was time for him to go to school. Patsy was delighted. He seemed to be just what Miri needed. She became stable to the point of laziness and had no more dramatic sinkings of spirit.

  Patsy found that she was not without a certain dull envy, and it was particularly prone to make itself felt on nights when Miri was at Eric’s. There were hours when life was noticeably empty, when she didn’t want to read or watch television or visit anyone there was to visit. She had restless hours, and very few ways to work off the restlessness. Various of the graduate students seemed always on the verge of asking her out, but none did, whether intimidated by the thought of Jim, or Hank, or simply her, she couldn’t tell. There were some she would have accepted dates with, but none she cared to pursue, so she never went out unless Eric and Miri were going to a movie and asked her along.

  At such times, feeling manless and over the hill and resenting both feelings, she usually called Hank and, often as not, picked a fight with him. Her own ambivalence toward him seemed to provide fertile seed for argument. She wanted him back, and yet she didn’t. If he were there he would probably eventually con her into marrying him, and she didn’t want to. She had a feeling that as a husband he would be more of a burden than a support, and having just dropped one burden she was not anxious to pick up another. She didn’t want him to come—she just wanted him to be there, without coming or being asked. It was an impossible desire. He was broke, and his car was broken down, but the unreasonableness of her desire did not keep it from being strong. It led to fights that neither of them expected and that neither of them could stop. Later, after an hour or two of resentment and self-pity, Patsy would usually break down and call back, and some sort of reconciliation would be effected, better than nothing, but a poor substitute for all that she missed. It was decided that in late April they would meet at the ranch again, and in brooding on it Patsy could not decide whether to leave Davey and go up alone or whether to take them all, Eric included. One day she felt one way, one day another. There were certain things the ranch house needed to make it fully habitable and she was more or less inclined to go up alone and buy them and move them in. But the date was a month away and on dull nights what she needed more than anything was something immediate to look forward to.

  It was on such a night that Jim called to present his conclusions on divorce. His calls had become increasingly infrequent and light and impersonal, and Patsy had come to take it for granted that his conclusions, once he got around to presenting them, would be positive for divorce. She even assumed that he would never get around to presenting them unless she or Clara prodded him. Thus it was a considerable surprise when he called and said he wanted to talk about it, and then said he didn’t want a divorce, he wanted to get them back together again.

  “What did you say?” she asked. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I am. I still love you. If you’re fond of me at all I could make you love me now, I think. I’m smarter than I was.”

  Patsy was silent, troubled, not sure what to say.

  “You can’t have lost all your fondness for me,” Jim said.

  “Maybe I haven’t,” she said, “but it’s certainly not going to increase while you’re out there living with her. You are still living with her?”

  “Yes, but I can break it off.”

  “I wish you’d done it before you called.”

  “I can,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can, but you’re not willing to until you’re sure of me, right?”

  “Why are you always so skeptical of me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He went on, but not so confidently as he had begun. It turned out he wanted Patsy to sell the house and bring Davey to L.A.

  “For god’s sake why?”

  “I like my job and I like California.”

  “You like Los Angeles?” she asked.

  “Sure. You weren’t here long enough to be able to appreciate it.”

  “It seemed long enough to me,” Patsy said. “Anyway, that’s impossible. I have Miri now, remember. She’s doing fine and she’s going to stay right here where Juanita and I can take care of her until she has her baby.”

  She could tell by his silence that he was annoyed, that he felt she was more concerned with Miri than with saving their marriage. But he held his annoyance in.

  “Well, that won’t be too long,” he said. “I could break off with Clara and once Miri’s okay you could come on out.”

  “Oh, Jim,” she said. “That will be months. We’ll have half forgotten one another by then. We’ve half forgotten one another now.”

  “So you don’t really want to stay married?”

  “I don’t want to move to Los Angeles,” Patsy said. “Any time. I like this house very much and I don’t want to move out of it.”

  “I suppose it’s convenient,” he said. “You can see your boy friend.”

  “I haven’t. Not since I went to California. I think we can leave him out of it.”

  “Why?” he said, “It’s tit for tat. You want me to give up Clara.”

  “It’s not tit for tat. I’m not living with him and I never have.”

  They were both silent, uncertain as to where to go with the conversation. “Why don’t you come back here if you want to stay married?” Patsy asked. “If you like your job so much maybe you could get transferred. I’m sure there’s an IBM office here. I don’t want Davey growing up in Los Angeles. It’s too provincial.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “Don’t be so provincial.”

  They reached a point where they both wanted to stop talking. Suddenly the idea of reuniting struck them both as absurd. They ceased to be angry and rang off as politely as casual acquaintances.

  But Jim was not quite through with it. He called again three days later and said he was looking into the transfer possibility. For a moment Patsy felt receptive. She had been thinking about it for three days, and in the abstract, detached from the actuality of Jim, a reconciliation seemed highly reasonable and highly desirable. It would simplify the future enormously. She would not have to move, not have to get a divorce, not have to make any hard decisions. She would simply have a husband again, and one who was a known quantity. Hank, considered as a husband, was only a question mark. He had never even really proposed.

  Thus, she was thinking affirmatively of a reconciliation, but when Jim actually called and spoke of returning she did a quick switch within herself. Something hardened. She didn’t like his tone. It was the tone he used when he was thinking of abandoning one line of work and starting another.

  “Are you sure it’s me you want back?” she asked. “Or are you just tired of what you’re doing?”

  “I knew you’d ask that,” he said bitterly. “Every time I try to approach you, you ask something like that. You don’t believe in me at all. You block me at every goddamn turn with some question.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Patsy said, and she was, a little. “It’s my future too.”

  “I do want you,” he said. “I do. Maybe I’m a little confused right now, but I do. If I can’t get a transfer I’m sure I can get some kind of job in Houston. I could go back to graduate school, if worst comes to worst. It isn’t as if we need money.”

  The more he talked the more she hardened, and the surer she felt in her resistance. He began to talk about all they could do, the ways they could improve themselves, and in the midst of his projection of the future she cut him off.

  “No,” she said. “No, no. I’m sorry. I don’t want it.”

  “What?” he said, a lit
tle panicky. “Don’t want what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, weary of talk. “I don’t want what you’re imagining. I don’t want you, either. I just don’t want any more of anyone’s confusion. I can barely cope with my own. If I marry again I’m going to marry someone who knows what he’s doing, even if he’s sixty years old.”

  Jim had trouble believing that she meant it. “But you have to be a little tolerant, my god,” he said. “Everyone’s a little confused.”

  “I should be but I don’t have to be,” Patsy said. “I’m just not tolerant—I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk about it any more. I’ll do anything you want to about a divorce. I’ll go to Juárez if you want me to.”

  He wouldn’t believe it, not that night or the next or the next. He called every night, and they argued. The arguments flared into fights, she wept, her stomach hurt, Jim threatened to come, they rehashed all their old grievances against each other, and always it came out the same. “Quit badgering me,” she said finally. “Do something if you want something to change. I don’t want to go through this every night.”

  Jim quit calling, but it did not improve her mood. For a week she felt bad about herself. Through sheer obstinacy she had succeeded in welding him to another woman. It annoyed her that he was never able to break her down, for it left her feeling that she was hard and domineering. But there it was. She got her way whether she really wanted it or not. And probably she would be the same with Hank or anyone—hard, obstinate, and unmovable. She doubted that anyone could really cope with her willfulness, or that anyone would really want to for long.

  One afternoon late in April, she found herself in a deep midafternoon depression, sick of everything. She was sick of giving orders to Juanita, sick of walking Davey to the same park every day, sick of cooking meals for Miri and Eric, sick of watching them hold hands, sick of thinking about Jim, and sick of thinking about Hank. She was sick of Emma, whose problems depressed her more than her own, and sick of Houston, with its stagnant, fishy morning smells. She was sick of everything. She moved about the house in a state of near-desperate disgust with everything, herself, her wretched temperament, and the general conditions of life. She was even constipated and was in the bathroom laying unsuccessful seige on her intestines. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and decided to cut her hair. She got her scissors and came back and cut it immediately. Davey was just up from his nap and waddled in while she was doing it. He picked up some of the fallen tresses and soon had hair all over his clean corduroy overalls. “Oh, get out of here,” Patsy said, very irritated. She dragged him out, gave him a sharp little splat on his behind, shut the door, and continued to cut, not heeding Davey’s offended wails. She did a rough job of cutting, but when she finished, her hair was short. Unevenly short, but short. She gathered up the fallen hair and stuffed it in the bathroom wastebasket, then lay on her bed and cried until her face was puffy. Davey came in while she was crying, tugged one of her house shoes off, and took it away. He was still very fond of house shoes.