Moving On (116 page)

“Well, it’ll grow back, I guess,” Eric said. Eric looked on the bright side, and when he encountered a flame that needed damping, his customary procedure was to smother it with optimistic truisms. Patsy was well aware of the habit; it was one of the few things she didn’t like about him. Davey wailed for his spoons, stretching his fingers piteously toward the floor.

“Oh, pick up his goddamn spoons,” she said. “Shut up about my hair or I’ll throw this spaghetti at you. Don’t say anything optimistic, either. For all you know I may go bald.”

But it was hard for Eric to choke off his optimism so abruptly. “You could get a nice wig,” he said, and then, looking at her, decided he would take Davey into the living room and wait for Miri there.

By the time they got back from the movie Patsy’s pet had passed off and she apologized for her rudeness. He shrugged. “I guess it was a symbolic gesture,” he said sagely.

“Right,” Patsy said. “A symbolic gesture meaning fuck everything.”

He and Miri had come in rather timorously, prepared for an attack, and Eric was so relieved that Patsy was in a better mood that he gave vent to more optimism. “Well, you’ll probably feel better about something soon,” he said.

“No, that’s the point. I’m not going to feel better. I’m resigned to a wasted life. I deserve one and I’m going to have one.”

“Why?” Miri asked.

“Don’t ask me why.”

“I agree, you know,” Eric said. “I’m resigned to one too. Got any coffee? We have to study.”

“We? What’s she studying?”

“Babies,” Miri said. She had used Eric’s library card and checked out all the books on babies that Patsy had read a year and a half before. Raymond Hammett’s child was beginning to interest her. Seeing the books gave Patsy a sense of déja vu, and it got worse, for in a little while Miri stretched out on the floor and had with Eric the conversation about
Tristram Shandy
that she had had with Hank when he was trying to read it. Eric didn’t like it either, and Patsy loved it and joined the argument. In a minute she was arguing with Eric about Norman Mailer. They both got very excited.

Patsy eventually won the argument over Sterne, but Eric wore her down on the subject of Mailer. She got up yawning and left the living room to the lovers. “Even if we started talking about
Beowulf
I bet we’d end up talking about Norman Mailer,” she said. “If I had any more hair I’d go cut it off.”

“Have a baby,” Miri suggested. “It takes your mind off literature.”

“Not a bad idea,” Patsy said. “If you see Dashiell Chandler have him look me up.”

The next day her midafternoon gloom recurred, though not quite so severely, and she went to the drugstore and attempted to cut it with a milkshake and a couple of fashion magazines. Bill Duffin came in while she was reading and once again managed to survey what she was reading before she noticed him.

“You see more bosom in
Vogue
than you see in
Playboy
these days,” he said. “Better bosom too.”

In an attempt to conceal the damage she had done she wore a blue scarf around her head, but the change was not lost on William Duffin.

“You have a lovely neck,” he said. “I always suspected it.”

Patsy went on reading.

“I wish I had back all the compliments I’ve wasted on you,” he said, looking at her with exasperation.

“They’ve been rather common, as I remember,” Patsy said. “I shouldn’t think their loss would have bankrupted your imagination.”

“Your neck is certainly lovelier than your disposition.”

“Yes, I’m in touchy temper these days. I’m likely to trample your middle-aged sensibilities if you’re not careful.”

“I hear you saw my daughter and liked her young man.”

“Oh, very much.”

“I hear he’s taller than me.”

“He is. Sweeter too.” She smiled. Bill smiled too. “Trampling your sensibilities is like trampling ball bearings,” she said.

“I’m really nicer, now that I’ve quit trying to s-c-r-e-w you.”

She was amused. “Whose modesty are you sparing?” she asked. “You never really tried very hard, you know.”

“I’m aging. I need easy conquests.”

“Every time I see you in this drugstore all we do is talk about sex. Can’t we have an ordinary conversation?”

“Good milkshake?” he said, to oblige her.

“Yep, they keep calling me back. Would you and Lee like to come to dinner in your former house next week? I didn’t get a chance to make Melissa any sort of return for all the kind things she did for me. The least I can do is feed her parents.”

“We’d love to,” Bill said.

He prevailed upon her to let him pay for her milkshake for once. The invitation had been quite spur-of-the-moment, but she was glad she had done it. The Duffins would be a pleasant change from Eric and Miri. She walked home feeling better. Perhaps she would invite the Hortons. A strong temptation came over her to call Hank and insist that he come and be her date. It would be a nice occasion on which to have a date. She envisioned it as being very pleasant and gay—her debut as a woman of the world.

But when she talked to Hank next she changed her mind and didn’t mention the dinner. In the end she called Kenny Cambridge and asked him to be her date. “You’ll wear a tie and you’ll pour the wine,” she said.

“Am I supposed to be a date or a waiter?” he asked good-humoredly.

“A date with many duties and few privileges,” she said. “This is your big chance, you realize.”

Kenny actually wore a tie, poured the wine, corrupted himself by talking scholarship politely with Bill and Flap, and grinned at the end of the evening when Patsy gave him a handshake as a reward. Earlier, Bill Duffin had praised her cooking and had bent down majestically and kissed her on the cheek. Lee, clearly in a down phase, had been silent all evening, subdued and a little bitter-looking.

“This isn’t what I had in mind,” Kenny said. “My services merit a better reward.”

“Well, possibly. What did you have in mind?”

“Jim has a copy of Gary Snyder’s first book,” he said. “He’s my favorite poet. Could I have it?”

“Good god,” she said. “Help yourself, if you can find it. It’s what I get for asking a literary man to be my date. You could have asked for me. Next time I’ll get me a cowboy. I wish I could remember the name of the first one who ever tried to seduce me. He pissed on my car. He wouldn’t have been thinking of Gary Snyder in such a situation.”

“That’s the way it goes,” Kenny said, and as he went out he too kissed her on the cheek.

19

T
HE WEEK AFTER
she had the Duffins in to dinner, Patsy received an invitation which surprised her. It was from a couple called the Caldwells, an older couple who were friends of Jim’s parents. She and Jim scarcely knew them, but twice, on grand occasions, they had been asked to dinner at the Caldwells’ and had gone and been bored in a quiet but high style.

The Caldwells were of the very wealthy; their fortune was one of the most respectable and the most respected in the state, but it was respected within a certain circle only, for they were in no sense flamboyant. The Caldwells were not of the Hunts, the Mecoms, or the Murchisons. They built no hotels, bought no football teams, owned no newspapers; they had no links with the White House, raced no horses, bred no fancy cattle. The Caldwells had no image at all or, at least, none comparable to the size of their fortune. They were known nationally only to those who knew finance, and locally as regular, dutiful contributors to charity and to the arts. They lived much as Jim’s parents lived, quietly if restlessly, and occupied their time with travel and rather haphazard art collecting. They were not extraordinarily memorable, or extraordinarily likable, but they were pleasant, they were kindly, they seemed like people who had been able to occupy themselves for sixty years without going crazy and hoped, with luck, to keep it up another decade or so. The dinners Jim and Patsy attended had been stiff. The Caldwells knew only the wealthy and enjoyed only a small fraction of the wealthy they knew—mostly rather quiet conservative people like themselves who, despite their fortunes, seemed bent on nothing more ambitious than not going crazy. The talk at the dinners was not unpleasant, just uninspired. A little politics, a little gossip, usually pedestrian and fairly good-natured, a little sport, a little art, and mostly places—places everyone had been, places everyone would go again, in particular Mexico.

Mrs. Caldwell was a thin graying woman who gave an impression of feebleness. She smoked a great deal and the hand she held her cigarette with shook. Hostessing seemed an effort for her, but she worked at it. Individual guests were sometimes taken for long distances into the interior of the huge house to be shown particular works of art. Patsy had once been shown three Rothkos.

The dinner party of the evening was larger than the ones she and Jim had attended. Some twenty people were there, enough to fill the small paneled den where cocktails were being served. The den held no Rothkos, only an English oil portrait. Mr. Caldwell—Ted, he liked to be called—was a small dapper man; he was fond of Patsy, twinkled at her, and shook her hand at length. Mrs. Caldwell kissed her, as she always did, and as always Patsy found it difficult not to notice that at some point Mrs. Caldwell had had a face-lifting operation. While Mr. Caldwell was shaking her hand and telling her an anecdote about Jim’s parents, whose path he had crossed in New York, of all places, Patsy looked past him into the room and saw, with a strange shock of surprise, that Eleanor Guthrie was there. It should have been no surprise, for in terms of fortune Eleanor and the Caldwells were peers, and in Texas peers of that class all knew one another. But she was a person Patsy had never expected to see again, and there she was, sitting across the room. The attentions of three men were focused on her, one sitting on each side of her, drink in hand, one standing looking down at her, swirling his drink; but Eleanor’s attention seemed not to be focused anywhere. She too held a drink and seemed to be listening only in the most perfunctory way to the remarks the three men made. She was dressed in brown, and very soberly, and her heavy dark blond hair was combed long.

Patsy was taken and introduced to the two youngest couples there. They were standing in a corner, rather apart, talking of Antonioni.
Blow-Up
had been the rage two years before and Patsy was a little surprised to find people still talking about it, but she was ever quick with an opinion and chatted pleasantly until dinnertime. One of the men was a broker, the other in oil. Their wives were Eastern girls, smart and very pretty; they fluttered as gallantly as possible in the stiff social shrubbery of Houston. Patsy liked them and hoped they liked her. She felt in need of new friends. But all the while, as she talked, she was slightly conscious of Eleanor Guthrie behind her. What she really wanted to do was go over, cut through the men, and talk with Eleanor. She wanted to, but she didn’t; she didn’t even get to speak to her as they were moving in to dinner. She noticed, though, that Eleanor seemed heavier, not only her body but her face. Her legs seemed thin. Her weight, which she had once worked at keeping well distributed, had gone to her middle, to her stomach and hips, and she moved more slackly than she had. She was seated at the side of her host, Ted Caldwell, and Patsy was almost at the opposite end of the table, next to a bald and very shrewd-looking investment counselor who talked to her learnedly of wines. When he saw that his connoisseurship was boring her a little he grew silent, and to encourage him Patsy told him she had a certain amount of money and wondered if she ought to come to him for counseling. He asked her how much, and when she told him he very tactfully explained why he could not handle accounts of that size. She felt a little deflated, for she had always supposed herself to be a girl with money. Jim’s having so much more had never mattered to her, and it was a mild shock to find that, in comparison to the other people at the table, she had little more financial weight than a ribbon clerk at Woolworth’s.

It was difficult, even after dinner, for her to get near Eleanor, and so far as she could tell, Eleanor had not recognized her, probably because of her short hair. When they left the table the two young Eastern wives caught Patsy again, and the same three men caught Eleanor, and Patsy was afraid she might actually leave without them speaking. Finally she excused herself and went and stood slightly behind the two men and Eleanor looked up from her brandy and saw her. There was a strained expression on her face, the effect of trying to be polite in a situation that simply didn’t reach her.

“Why, Mrs. Carpenter,” she said and stood up and took Patsy’s hand. The men had been like a wall, but when Eleanor stood up they sank back. She managed, merely by the way she spoke to Patsy, to cut them off, to make them understand that a person she wished to talk to had appeared. The men were perfunctorily introduced and moved a little distance away, politely and mutually annoyed, but aware that they were powerless. For a minute or two Patsy was aware of them as slightly antagonistic presences nearby, but then she forgot them, as Eleanor clearly had.

For a second after saying hello they both fell awkwardly silent, Eleanor adjusting to her surprise, Patsy simply not sure what to say. Eleanor recovered first.

“You’ve cut your hair,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you. I kept thinking as I was eating that I heard a familiar voice, somewhere around the table. How have you been?”

“Oh, fine,” Patsy said. She felt odd and almost regretted having spoken to Eleanor, for where could it lead? They didn’t know each other well enough to talk—not to talk personally—and yet, because of the people, the men they had known, they knew each other too well for dinner party chitchat to be absorbing. She might as well have stayed across the room with the young Eastern women, talking of Antonioni. The men from whom she had taken Eleanor were still there, waiting to draw around her again. Fortunately Eleanor sensed the feeling and knew what to do about it.

“I have to go to the powder room for a minute,” she said. “Would you like to come along? I’ve got so I can’t think in rooms full of people.”