Moving On (103 page)

Kenny talked to her coaxingly and quietly, telling her it was okay, telling her she would feel better by and by. They were both startled by the change in her. The raging, frightening, all but unhandleable woman of a few minutes before was gone and she looked like a girl again, a girl who was pale and who felt sick. They squatted by the chair watching her. Now that she was quiet and helpless they both felt touched, a little enchanted with her again, and loyal and on her side. They felt rather comradely too; they had seen her through it.

After a while she opened her eyes—she obviously felt ghastly.

“Feel well enough for us to get you home?” Kenny asked.

She shook her head weakly. “I don’t feel good,” she said.

In the end she stayed the night. Kenny made his bed as neatly as possible and Patsy slept on top of the covers, her coat over her legs. Peewee and Kenny sat on the floor and drank beer, talking quietly of this and that, Patsy and Jim, rodeos, motor bikes, and the adventures of their youth. They talked the rest of the night almost. Peewee fell asleep on the floor at four
A.M
. and Kenny read J. P. Donleavy the rest of the night.

Patsy began to stir at six. She didn’t feel much better than she had, but she realized the necessity of getting home. Davey would be waking. Peewee was a heap in a corner. Kenny had thrown a blanket over him and set his black hat where he could find it when he awoke. The sight of Peewee sleeping was so funny and pathetic that she managed a pained grin. Kenny was cheerful and took her home. “You’ll live, you’ll live,” he kept telling her on the way. She had her eyes shut.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

She felt awkward, not asking him in for coffee, since he had been so hospitable, but she didn’t want Juanita to think she had spent the night with him, so she didn’t. Kenny didn’t care. He went off whistling, looking very boyish.

She had thirty minutes in which to gain strength before Juanita brought Davey down. She spent it sitting at the kitchen table yawning and feeling queasy. Davey, once he appeared, was all hunger and sunshine, and Juanita quietly sympathetic. “Parties weel wear you out,” she said.

As she was dragging herself up to bathe, Patsy found a little note from Emma on the table by the stairs. “Fine pair you picked to go off the deep end with,” it read. “Flap was very hurt. Everybody liked your party, and all got drunker. Emma.”

13

F
OR SIX WEEKS
, through the last half of January and all February, nothing happened. It was the soggy part of the Houston winter—not very cold but with much rain. While she was recovering from the party, Patsy caught a low-grade virus of some kind and didn’t manage to shake it for two weeks. It was more boring than painful, the only painful part being the shots she kept having to get in her behind. The rest of the time she felt slightly feverish and dull. Bill Duffin had left a garage half full of wood; after much smoky experimenting she learned to make fires in the fireplace. It made being slightly ill much more pleasant. Her good couch finally came and she arranged it in front of the fireplace, with a good lamp at each end, and spent most of her time on the couch reading. She had had the foresight to make Jim leave her his library card, and every few days she bundled up and sloshed to the Rice library to get an armful of novels. If she didn’t feel like novels she went to the drugstore and read magazines. She grew quite lazy and was reluctant to go out at all. She even took to ordering her groceries by phone.

Indeed, for the period of her illness she began to live on the phone. She couldn’t go to the Hortons’, for fear of giving her virus to the children, so she talked to Emma on the phone. Emma was all hung up on how life would be in Iowa City. Patsy could not herself imagine living in Iowa City, but as a service to her friend she adopted the philosophy that it matters not where you are but how you are. She knew better, but she was good at defending philosophical positions that she didn’t really agree with, and she usually managed to cheer Emma up.

Her mother was a different matter. Jeanette was in a period of crisis. Miri was the ostensible cause, but there were other reasons. She had absolutely nothing to do, even less than Patsy. Garland had decided his fortunes were declining and had started feverishly attending to business. He was gone most of the time, and in any case he felt like a failure in regard to Miri and didn’t like for Jeanette to talk about it with him; so she talked about it with Patsy. She called four or five times a week to talk about it. Patsy was tolerant as long as the talk was about Miri or her father; she was not tolerant when Jeanette tried to find out what was happening with her and Jim. That she refused to discuss. But she did promise definitely to go to California in March and try to do something about Miri. It allowed Jeanette to talk for more hours about all that might be done.

Generally she heard from Hank once a week, and once a week from Jim. Neither calls were very satisfactory. With Jim she had to walk a narrow line. She did not want to blow her cool, for if she did she fumed and stewed and felt bad inside for hours afterward. In order not to blow her cool she had to be careful. She asked as few questions as possible. She kept off the future, she kept off the past. She kept off them. She told him about Davey, and he told her about life in California. The result was that their conversations were so polite and superficial that they might as well have not talked at all. After such a conversation Jim seemed very remote to her; she could scarcely visualize him. Often, looking at Davey, it pained and puzzled her that the man who had fathered him could have become so remote, so without tangibility as a person.

And when the politeness did not work, when something was said that caused one or the other of them to blow their cool, it was just as bad. What she felt for him then was worse: resentment and bitterness that he could leave her so easily. She forgot the months of fighting; his departure seemed cheap and whimsical. And it seemed to her that cowardice kept him from coming back. It filled her with disgust. Remoteness was easier on her stomach than spleen, so their conversations became politer and politer and she thought of him less and less often and remembered him less and less well.

With Hank’s calls the opposite was true. Again there was a narrow line to be walked, but in his case what she had to try and do was keep from remembering him too well. If his voice struck a certain tone then all that she missed became vivid and she missed it more painfully. Sometimes then longing became irritability, and irritability anger, and she fought with him more bitterly than she fought with Jim. All their conversations were chancy, for the sense of missingness was apt to swell terribly after she hung up, and then there was nothing to do but wait for its slow going-away. Gradually she developed a workable middle tone, a style of banter that kept things more or less level.

What energy she had was spent mostly on Davey and on the house. The house absorbed hours of thought. She had very quickly become discontent with having Davey on the third floor, beautiful as the third floor was. It was a mistake. At night she worried about fires. What if one occurred while he was up there? And even in the purest practical sense it was awkward. He still had to be carried, but he had grown heavy, and it was a long carry from the kitchen to the third floor. After three weeks she moved him down a floor. When he got old enough to walk upstairs he could return to the third. Juanita breathed a sigh of relief; constant trips up two flights of stairs were breaking her health, she felt.

But better than the house was Davey himself. As he approached his first birthday and became—every week it seemed—a little less a baby, a little more a small boy, he entered upon a period of very active happiness. He didn’t miss his father, he didn’t miss anything. From the time he woke up, wanting his mother, wanting attention, wanting food, until after he and she had completed the various little bed games he liked to play, his days were a crude flow of activity, broken only by an afternoon nap. He was good-natured, laughed and babbled more than he cried, and he did not seem overly demanding. Yet, from early morning until evening it seemed that she or Juanita or both of them at once were in constant motion, getting him, cleaning up after him, keeping him out of things, finding toys for him when he was in bed or getting toys out of bed for him when he happened to be on the floor, feeding him, changing him, doing
something
with him. They could both tell from the tone of his wails whether a particular problem was serious trouble or a mere momentary frustration.

He was, it seemed to Patsy, exceptionally communicative. When he wanted her to know something he sought her out. She would be lying in a doze on the couch, still in her bathrobe, warmed by the fire, and would be awakened by Davey yanking on her hair. It was his method of announcing a message. Sometimes the sound of his crawling awakened her, for he crawled rapidly and it was easy to tell when he left the rug and struck the bare floor. For all that he was less than one, he gave the house a kind of masculine center. Patsy talked to him a lot, chattered at him, sang him songs, sat him on her stomach if she was lying down or on her lap if she was sitting up. She was thinking of getting him a dog, and she constantly read pet ads. He had her dark hair, and it was getting longer.

At times the rapport she had with Davey frightened her a little; she wondered if it was abnormal. She missed Hank whenever he called and reminded her of himself, and sometimes in lonely moods she missed Jim, but there were days when she missed neither of them, when Hank was as vague to her as Jim. Even Hank, who had been so tangible, was becoming intangible little by little. Davey was completely tangible, sitting on her stomach chewing on his rubber kitty or pulling her hair, or poking his fingers in her mouth, cheerfully gobbling food, drenching diapers, and kicking merrily while his behind was being powdered. Every night she brought him in from his bath wrapped in a huge towel and plopped him on her bed to be diapered and pajamaed. He quickly made a game of not liking to be diapered and would wiggle out of the towel and dart to the corners of the bed to elude her, naked and giggly, the ends of his hair still wet. Eventually Patsy would catch him by a foot and drag him to the center of the bed, dry his hair roughly, and roll him on his back. Once he had had his play out he generally assented to being dressed, though he really preferred being naked, and would chew on the rubber sleep-with kitty while she pinned the diapers. His little stomach bulged out of his unbuttoned pajamas and Patsy would rub it affectionately as she was buttoning him, or splutter on it while he grabbed her hair and exploded with giggles. She never rocked him at night, but often she rocked him in the afternoon, if he seemed reluctant to nap, and after a great deal of wiggling and looking up to see if she was still there he would go to sleep on her shoulder and she would put him in bed and stand a moment smoothing the long wavy black hair at his temples.

One night when she was absently rubbing his stomach and he just as absently chewing the rubber kitty, Patsy caught herself with a start; she was stroking her son with the same sort of pure tactile enjoyment that she might get from stroking a man. At least it had reminded her of men. She didn’t feel depraved, exactly, just thoughtful, and after a time buttoned Davey’s pajamas over his stomach and put him to bed.

In a few weeks, when she got over her flu and felt well again, she noticed that she was not unhappy. Lonely at times, but not unhappy. She was becoming cheerful again, cheerful in a way that she had not been for a year. There was a stretch of fine weather in February and she began to delight in the three big trees in the back yard, to plan the back yard, and to look for yard furniture. Shopping and chatting with store people became fun again, and her laundry man told her she was beautiful. At home, Davey kept her and Juanita giggling half the time. At night, when she was low, or thought about it, she wondered about herself—wondered if she was one of those women who didn’t need a mate, only a child. She wondered if she would become some kind of cannibal mother, devouring Davey, absorbing him and being absorbed by him in too intense a way. She didn’t want to, she didn’t mean to, but as the spring approached she found herself being happier and more self-sufficient every day, with no man around but him.

One day she wandered into the Russian section of the library and decided she ought to read a Russian novel. She practically never had, except
Crime and Punishment
, which she hadn’t much liked. She decided she would read a Tolstoy, a Dostoevsky, and a Turgenev, and so brought home
Anna Karenina, The Idiot
, and
Fathers and Sons
.

The only one of the three she read was
Anna
. She remembered having tried it in high school; she had stopped after a hundred pages and had never gone on. This time she went on, hurriedly and a little irritably. Kitty and Levin she skipped whenever she could. Their innocence merely annoyed her; it was stupid and there was nothing absorbing in it. She wanted to read about Anna, though it was painful to do so. Anna was so exposed that reading about her was embarrassing; Patsy read page after page with a pinched frown and yet went on, as if it were a medicine she must take, and at the end, when she closed the book with Anna dead, she felt more depressed than she had at any time since Hank and Jim went away.

The depression lasted two days and then lifted as suddenly as it had come. Some discrepancy between the novel and her own life discouraged her terribly. Her own sins had been so small-time; her marriage, and her affair as well, so weak and short-term. She hadn’t sustained anything for years against all sorts of obstacles, as Anna had done. She wasn’t dead, nor even ruined, and neither were her husband and her lover. Even the dull psychiatrist hadn’t been very interested in a problem as ordinary as hers. She was not even meat for a good case history, much less a novel. It had all been trivial, and probably in the end amounted to nothing more than that she had run into someone she liked sex with better than she liked it with her husband. Society didn’t care what she did—not really. She wasn’t being persecuted, or insulted at operas; she wouldn’t lose her child; she had money and friends and looks and not even any reason to feel overwhelmingly guilty, since so far as she could tell, her husband was going to be happier in his new life than he had ever been with her. It was too near to nothing, all of it, and she didn’t know why it had seemed so intense and so crucial and so much the end of everything when it had been all the time such an ordinary episode. She had scorned Jim for calling it tragic, yet there were times when she herself assumed it must be: tragic that they could not make a harmony out of their feelings, tragic that they could not be what they ought to be. But when she finished
Anna
she felt bruised by a sense of the triviality of her marriage, the timidity of her affair. The worst of it was that her memory was so bad. The passion Anna had felt for Vronsky was more easily remembered than anything she had felt for Hank. She could barely remember the good parts of her marriage or her affair. Her thoughts took her in circles, and in small ordinary circles, at that. In her depression she felt drab and worthless, just a shallow young woman who had managed to screw up two men, one of them her husband.