“Yes, and besides that the whole centennial would collapse,” he said.
Little Mike wandered out. Jacy offered him a bite of pasta. Little Mike shook his head. “No,” he said.
“Okay,” Jacy said. “Be that way.” She ate the bite herself.
Little Mike, regretting his decision, reached supplicatingly toward the pasta. Jacy gave him a bite. After savoring it, he turned and sat astraddle of Shorty, who was sleeping nearby. Shorty promptly dumped him on his back. Little Mike began to squall. Jack picked him up by his feet and dangled him over the swimming pool.
“Stop squalling,” Jack said. “If you don’t I’ll drop you.”
Little Mike stopped.
“He knows I mean business,” Jack said.
“You’re a bully,” Julie said. “He’s just a baby. He could develop a fear of water and never learn to swim because of you.”
“Who cares if he learns to swim?” Jack said.
“What if he fell out of a motorboat?” Julie asked.
“What if you fell in a tub of shit,” Jack said.
“What if you drowned in a bucket of puke,” Julie said.
Jacy poured Duane some more wine.
“You’re looking a little less nervous,” she said. “Lulled by the familiar sound of your own children’s invective, I guess.”
“I guess,” Duane said.
“Go work on your getting-off song, kids,” Jacy said. “Leave your father and me in peace. And take your nephew back to his mother, please.”
Jack carried Little Mike into the house by his heels. Nellie soon came out and got the plates.
“That was good, honey,” Duane said.
Nellie smiled at the compliment, but seemed a little downcast.
“I think you’ve got problems with that one,” Jacy said.
“I thought I had problems with all of them,” Duane said.
“Come and meet my girls sometime,” Jacy said. “I’ll show you problems.”
Her remark seemed to depress her.
“How’d you teach Nellie to cook so quick?” Duane asked.
“I haven’t taught her to cook, I just taught her how to make fettucine,” Jacy said in a flat voice. “Let’s go in and watch a movie.”
They went into the house and down a hall, passing the den. Both Minerva and Dickie were now absorbed in the ball game.
“This is the master bedroom,” Jacy said, leading him into a large room. She pulled back some curtains on the south wall, revealing long sliding glass doors, which she opened. The edge of the bluff was only a few feet away from the doors. Below it the plains stretched far to the south. Duane stepped outside a moment. To the southwest he could see one of his own rigs, the lights twinkling on it.
“Is that yours?” Jacy asked.
“Mine today,” Duane said. “I don’t know about next week.”
Jacy turned on a light and began to look through a stack of cassettes by her bed. The house in general had seemed very neat, but the bedroom wasn’t. The bed was piled with magazines and tapes, and there were several wineglasses beside it.
“Don’t look at this mess,” Jacy said. “Do you want to see Paris, Texas?”
“Whatever you’d like,” Duane said.
“Whatever I’d like,” Jacy repeated. “I guess I’ll have to reflect on my preferences. Excuse me while I do that.”
She disappeared into the bathroom and came back a minute later, wearing a kimono and carrying a hairbrush. She put the cassette into the VCR, came back to the bed and sat down, arranging a variety of pillows.
Duane stood awkwardly in the doorway.
Jacy looked at him in a way that seemed rather unfriendly.
“Are you going to watch the movie standing up?” she asked.
“I’d rather not,” he said.
“Then take your boots off and get comfortable.”
He did as commanded and sat on the bed. Jacy offered him some wine. Somewhat later, when they were into the movie, she offered him her foot to rub.
“My preference is for a foot rub,” she said.
Other than that, she didn’t speak during the film. She left the room once and returned with another bottle of wine. From time to time she put her feet in Duane’s lap to be rubbed. Parts of the movie interested him, parts of it didn’t. He had stopped feeling nervous and began to feel tired. Once or twice he dozed. Though silent, Jacy seemed wide-awake. Duane tried to stay alert but it became harder and harder. He was sinking into fatigue. When the movie was over Jacy removed her feet from his lap. She picked up a remote-control gadget and clicked the TV off.
“They should have called it ‘Houston, Germany,’” she said.
Duane yawned. He felt so tired he thought he might have to drive home in his stocking feet. He thought he might make it to his pickup, and once in the pickup could make it home, but the amount of energy it would take to pull his boots on was an amount he didn’t believe he could summon. They were new boots, and it was a tussle to get them on.
“Are you as tired as you look?” Jacy asked. She no longer seemed unfriendly.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“There’s an empty bedroom right across the hall,” Jacy said. “Do you think you can make it that far?”
“If I don’t have to put my boots on I can probably make it,” he said.
The bedroom seemed vast to him. It was vast, though no more so than the master bedroom in his new home.
“It’s stupid to build bedrooms this big,” he said. “When you’re really tired you don’t want to have to walk ten minutes just to get to bed.”
He stood up, though.
“That’s a good point,” Jacy said. “I wouldn’t want a bedroom this large, personally.”
He stooped and picked up his boots. Jacy was looking through her stock of movie cassettes.
“Are you going to watch another movie?” he asked. He felt so tired that it was momentarily hard to imagine anyone in the world who was not tired.
“Sure,” Jacy said.
Duane hobbled over to the door. A swinging pipe had brushed his hip that afternoon. He had considered it a light blow at the time, but now it felt sore.
“I could probably drive home,” he said. “I might get a second wind.”
“Duane, just go across the hall and go to bed,” Jacy said. “You don’t need a second wind. I normally wouldn’t have even made you get off the bed, but there’s the kids to consider.”
“The kids?”
“Your kids, remember?” she said. “Dickie, Nellie and the twins.”
“Oh,” he said. “The ones who steal vaseline and write songs about getting off.”
“That’s perfectly normal,” Jacy said. “Nothing wrong with that. But they wouldn’t think it was normal if Daddy spent the night in bed with Aunt Jacy just because he was too tired to get to his feet.”
“I don’t know how those kids would know what normal is, anymore,” Duane said. “I don’t know myself.”
“You may not but they do,” Jacy said. “They’re young. To them, normal is simple.”
He nodded and opened the door. Jacy got up, stepped past him, and opened a door across the hall.
“This one,” she said. “Come on now. It’s only a few steps.”
He walked across the hall, carrying his boots, into the empty bedroom.
“Goodnight, honey pie,” Jacy said, shutting the door behind him.
CHAPTER 54
DUANE WOKE EARLY, FEELING DISORIENTED. THE bedroom, like every other room in Los Dolores, contained wall-to-wall bookshelves filled with books. Out his window he could see the patio and the pool. Shorty was asleep on the diving board. The sun was up, how high he couldn’t tell, but he had the feeling that he had overslept by hours.
However, when he went to the kitchen, the only person around was Minerva.
“Who won the ball game?” he asked.
“What do you care, you don’t follow baseball,” Minerva snapped.
“I was
just seeing if my voice would work, Minerva,” he said. “I wasn’t really trying to make sense. I know I don’t make sense.”
“You do sometimes,” she said. She seemed a little sorry that she had snapped at him—even chastened, perhaps. In his experience of Minerva, such moments were rare.
“You better have some coffee,” she said. “You look shaky.”
Duane felt shaky. In the night he had had several dreams in which he ran into Karla in unlikely places. One of the places had been the Oklahoma City airport, where he had only been once in his life.
“Jacy’s up and gone,” Minerva said. “Why anybody would go swim in a lake when it’s still dark is beyond me. I wouldn’t swim in that lake in broad daylight.
“How’s Junior?” she inquired.
“He’s thinking of going on a fast,” Duane said.
“I guess he’s caught anorexia,” Minerva said.
“You can’t catch anorexia,” Duane said.
“You’d argue with a stump,” Minerva replied. “Of course you can catch it. Horses and cattle give it to you. If Junior had stayed an oilman he’d have been fine.”
Duane thought of drawing a distinction between anorexia and anthrax, but decided not to bother. Minerva seemed almost friendly for the first time in years, but she was not likely to stay that way if her judgments were questioned.
It proved to be only six-thirty in the morning, a respectable hour. He pulled on his boots and drove to town.
Jacy was breakfasting at the Dairy Queen, as he had hoped she would be.
“Well, you popped right out of bed, didn’t you?” she said.
“You bet,” Duane said. “I didn’t wanta give those kids the wrong idea.”
Jacy looked at him solemnly. She didn’t look happy.
“I don’t want to joke about love, Duane,” she said. “I don’t feel like it today.”
“I’m sorry,” he said at once.
Jacy shrugged. “I know I flirted a little but that’s just my nature.”
She thought a moment, blowing on her coffee.
“Actually, it’s just the vestige of my nature,” she said. “The ghost of my nature.”
Once again, her vivacity had left her. At the rehearsal the night before, and during the meal, she had seemed full of color and spirit. Even resting on the bed she seemed possessed of energies that made him feel embarrassed by his own listless-ness.
But now she herself had become listless and toneless. She pressed her long fingers against her temples as if trying to relieve a pressure.
“Headache?” Duane asked.
Jacy ignored the question. “When’s Karla coming back?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Duane said. “Today, probably. She don’t usually stay around her mother long.”
“Good,” Jacy said. “I hope it’s today.”
Her eyes reddened suddenly and she stood up, quickly gathering her purse and comb.
“I need her,” she said.
She hurried out of the restaurant, fighting back tears. Duane quickly followed. She stood by the Mercedes, crying and trying to find her keys in the small purse.
“This is a small purse,” she said. “Why can I never find my keys in it when I just want to go away in a hurry?”
She found them and quickly got in the car.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Duane asked.
“No,” Jacy said angrily. “I don’t need you, I need Karla.”
Not knowing what else to do, Duane stepped away from the car.
Jacy started to back up and then stopped. She looked out the window at him.
“I don’t think I paid for my breakfast,” she said. “That’s something you could do if you would.”
“I sure will,” Duane said.
CHAPTER 55
AFTER PAYING FOR THE TWO BREAKFASTS, DUANE started for his office, but stopped before he got there. He sat in his pickup, a hundred yards from the tennis courts. People driving down the road waved at him. After three or four waved at him Duane realized he hadn’t been waving back. Embarrassed, he drove quickly to the lake and got in his boat. He wanted to be somewhere where no one would wave at him.
He felt anxious, drifting in the boat. It seemed that life was becoming very abnormal. His family life had begun to swell and bulge in disturbing ways. Through the unexpected intervention of Jacy, his family seemed to be shaping up in certain areas—but he had the sense that he was becoming irrelevant to them. Somehow, in only a week or two, Jacy had forged a union with Karla and his family which more or less left him out.
It made him feel ineffectual. His wife and his old girlfriend needed one another, but neither of them seemed to need him.
In Jacy’s vivid moments she outshone the woman of his fantasy. A time or two he had felt himself slipping into loving her again. When she herself sank back into her pale, lonely unhappiness, he felt a great urge to hold her and comfort her.
But, as she had made clear, she wanted Karla, not him, to be her comforter.
He didn’t know what to make of it, but he felt disquieted. Drifting on the muddy lake, he tried to imagine Karla and Jacy together. His imagination didn’t take him far. Karla had lots of women friends. Duane realized he had never given much thought to what they said and or did when they were together. He assumed they ran around and bought clothes, or drank beer, or flirted with whatever were around. Probably they talked about children or traded complaints about men.
The thought kept nudging at his mind that maybe Karla and Jacy had a physical relationship. He didn’t know why the thought arose. The surface of the lake was dotted with the heads of mud turtles, with here and there a snapper. The thought that Jacy and Karla might be lovers kept bobbing up, turtlelike, in his mind.
What if they were falling in love?
He told himself he was probably being extremely foolish to think such a thing. Probably nothing of the sort was happening between Jacy and Karla. Not three weeks ago, when they were in the hot tub, Karla had specifically warned him not to imagine things about her life.
“Why can’t I?” he asked.
“Because you don’t know a thing about women and you never will,” Karla told him bluntly. “If you go around imagining things you’ll just cause trouble for everybody.”
“I guess I know a few things about you,” he said. “I’ve been married to you twenty-two years.”
“Yes, you know a few things,” Karla said. “About six or seven. Ten at the outside.”
She spoke in a flat tone.
“How many things are there to know about anybody?” he asked, wishing, almost before the words were out, that he hadn’t said them.
Karla laughed. “There’s only three or four things to know about you but there’s a million things to know about me,” she said. “There’s new things to know about me every day.”
“Name a few,” he challenged.
“They don’t have names, Duane,” she said. “They can just be feelings. They’re like those little plants I read about in the Smithsonian magazine that only bloom for one hour in twenty years. I’ve got little feelings that bloom like that. One might only bloom once in our whole marriage, and you’d be sitting right there, two feet away, and never notice it.”
She had said it rather unhappily. Duane had not taken the remark too seriously at the time. A feeling wasn’t a plant. There was no reason one could only bloom once in a marriage.
But now, as unhappy feelings of a sort he had never known before bloomed inside him, he realized Karla had not necessarily been exaggerating. He was not fool enough to suppose he knew everything about Karla. In the awkward years when their sexual relationship had ebbed, he had sometimes looked at her in bed, after a none-too-thrilling bit of lovemaking, and felt that a strange woman lay beside him, one he didn’t know at all.
Her remarks in the hot tub came back to him as he drifted amid the turtles, and he realized she might have been describing the situation accurately. He might only know a few simple t
hings about her. Thousands of complicated things might largely have escaped him.
He felt he had almost lost his basis for judgment in the last few weeks or months. Whatever Karla and Jacy were doing, he could hardly criticize, since he himself was occasionally to be found in bed with a woman who was in love with his son.
He had never supposed that people really lived as they ought to live, but he had gone through much of his life at least believing that there was a way they ought to live. And Thalia of all places—a modest small town—ought to be a place where people lived as they ought to live, allowing for a normal margin of human error. Surely, in Thalia, far removed from big-city temptations, people ought to be living on the old model—putting their families and neighbors first, leading more or less orderly, more or less responsible lives.
But he knew almost everyone in Thalia—indeed, knew more than he wanted to know about most of them—and it was clear from what he knew that the old model had been shattered. The arrival of money had cracked the model; its departure shattered it. Irrationality now flowered as prolifically as broom weeds in a wet year.
Worse, people had stopped even expecting themselves to behave rationally. They no longer cared—though some, who behaved little better than certifiable lunatics, for some reason expected him to remain sane and even expected him to be an arbiter of their behavior.
If he tried to hint that he could no longer rely on his own experience, people not only refused to believe him, they simply refused to hear him.
Duane stayed on the lake for two hours, turning things over in his head, worrying about Karla and Jacy without really being able to decide what it was he was worrying about. He remembered how awkward he had felt at Jacy’s. He didn’t know how to be with Jacy. Probably Karla would soon become more like Jacy, and he wouldn’t know how to be with her either.
Finally he started his motor and went ashore. It was getting very hot. There had hardly been a cloud in the sky for the past three weeks.
Genevieve Morgan was fishing near the dock when he pulled his boat up. It was her day off. She had backed her old Plymouth station wagon as close to the water as possible and was fishing from the tailgate of the car. Like Karla, Genevieve had a fondness for vodka tonics. She liked to spend her day off fishing and getting sloshed. She wore an old cowboy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes.
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