Moving On (13 page)

She started the Ford and drove slowly out Broadway, looking a little wistfully at the giant motels. Probably it was vulgar, a streak of Aunt Dixie in her, but she would much rather have been at a giant motel. She liked carpets and big bathtubs and good coffee shops and huge well-lit pools and television sets so there would be movies to watch at night. There would probably even be interesting people at a big motel. The only interesting person in theirs was a long-retired minor actor. He had a grenadier mustache, a chubby talkative wife, and a magnificent white Afghan so aristocratic that the whole motel seemed scarcely fit to be his kennel.

Around the pools of the big motels there were people sitting and drinking, some even swimming, though the night was cool. Patsy would have liked to be among them, and she felt a flash of annoyance at Jim. It was unfair, because if they had been at a big motel she would probably have been inside reading, but it was a strong annoyance, nonetheless. She had money and was glad of it and he had many times as much and his attitude toward it had been the cause of many fights, all of which she lost. From time to time he insisted on pretending they were poor, driven to earning their living from month to month, and when he set a budget at such times nothing could make him exceed it. Patsy pointed out in the wittiest possible terms that such budgets were ridiculous, but of all his fantasies the poverty fantasy was the one he was stubbornest about, and he never gave a foot of ground.

She pulled into the motel and locked the Ford. In contrast to the pools she had been passing, theirs seemed a small and uninviting fishpond. The old actor and his wife were just returning from walking the Afghan and said hello to her pleasantly. She felt depressed the minute she stepped into the room. The small room, the bare floor, the poor light, all seemed so confining in contrast to the wide streets and deep sky outside; and to make matters worse, Jim was already back. He sat on the floor with his shirt off, happily engaged in his favorite task, which was the rearranging of his files. She had seen it coming that afternoon when he had lugged the two small green cases of files in from the car. All of the hundreds of pictures he had managed to take were in piles on the floor, along with several stacks of folders, manila envelopes, pencils, felt pens, paper clips, and tabs of various kinds. He had even bought a bottle of bourbon—a pure affectation, it seemed to her—and had some, in a motel glass, sitting by his leg.

“Hi,” he said, very cheerful. “Not much happening out there tonight so I thought I’d come home and straighten this stuff out. We’re invited to a party tomorrow night.”

“Ducky,” she said, unreasonably annoyed. He had barely glanced up, and the sight of the absorbed, contented way he piddled with the neat piles of pictures and neat stacks of envelopes sent her spirits straight down. He was sitting there dreaming of being Walker Evans or Cartier-Bresson or Ansel Adams, whatever kind of photographer he wanted to be for the moment, and it made her furious and also, somehow, scared. She felt like kicking the bourbon glass, or kicking the piles of pictures into complete disorder, and could hardly stop herself from doing it. Three months as a photographer and he was already arranging his own retrospective in his mind.

Instead of kicking the pictures she tiptoed over them with exaggerated care, her lips compressed. If Jim had looked up he would have seen she was furious, but he was looking instead at a picture of the marquee of an abandoned drive-in theater they had passed in Texas. The local kids had visited it one night and done their best to spell out an obscenity with the letters still left on the marquee. The best they could do was HORS SHIT. It was one of his favorite pictures.

Patsy got her black bikini and a white terry-cloth robe and went to the bathroom and put on the bikini. Going back through the room, she took less care and one of her heels knocked a pile of pictures out of line.

“Where are you going?” Jim asked, surprised.

“I’m going to drown myself,” she said hotly. “I’m feverish with envy because I don’t have a noble profession to practice, like you do.”

“What?” Jim said, puzzled. He had not really heard. The reverie he was enjoying had a strong hold on him, and he didn’t want to be drawn out of it even if Patsy was miffed about something. She poised at the door, ready to argue if he wanted to argue, but when he looked down at the picture again she shut the door and strode angrily across the gravel driveway. The gravel hurt her bare feet, but not as much as she would have liked it to. She would have welcomed a flow of blood, either his or hers, but the only real pain was the pain at her breastbone, from the pressure of all her feelings. She sat down on the cold pool edge, let her feet into the water, and watched her own wavering reflection. The black of her suit and the white of her robe were plainer than her features or even her skin.

After a minute she began to cry helplessly. Jim was doing everything over. When he had wanted to be a novelist he spent two months arranging for it. He bought an electric typewriter—it only took the notion of a new career to drive all thought of economy out of his mind, then he used his money as lavishly and unconsciously as if it were air—all kinds of paper of different colors and grades, dozens of pencils, standard pens and esoteric pens, a new dictionary and a fine desk lamp, lots of manila envelopes, and good editions of the best novels by forty or fifty masters of the novel. He even bought biographies of novelists and criticism of the novel. He wrote letters to twenty agents (no replies), applied for three fellowships, wrote slightly more than one hundred pages of a book about growing up in Dallas, stopped one day to make notes, then instead of making notes began an elaborate chart of what was going to happen in the novel, improved on the chart and the notes for another month, and then began to spend his time in bars with fellow students while she read most of the novels he had bought.

After he had bought all the pens, pencils, papers, dictionaries, directories, and guidebooks he could possibly need he stopped even piddling with the actual pages of his novel, accidentally read a book on languages one day, and decided he would rather be a linguist than a novelist. It was more his sort of thing, he felt: more exact, more precise. It took experience to make a novelist, but anyone with a good brain could become a linguist. Patsy agreed and was glad he had decided to change careers. During his last days as a novelist he had been very gloomy and hard to live with, and besides she had read the hundred pages of novel and hadn’t liked it much. Once the decision was made, she pitched in, helped him carry home books from the Rice library, applauded him when he tried to audit five language courses at once, and looked with interest into the grammars, dictionaries, journals, and books on linguistic theory that he ordered. The waiters at the local French restaurant smiled behind their menus when he tried to order in French, but Patsy didn’t care. She got rather interested in Benjamin Lee Whorf herself and was happy at the thought of being a linguist’s wife.

Then, after two months as a linguist, he bought a cheap camera to take snapshots with and within the next six weeks spent twelve hundred dollars on cameras and equipment and was thinking of setting himself up a darkroom. The way he meant to do it would combine writing and photography, he decided, and by the merest chance he got hot on cameras during the fortnight when the Houston rodeo was on. He went out to the stock barns, took a few pictures of the back ends of steers so pampered that their tails were kept in hairnets, and three days later decided they would spend the summer gathering pictures for a book on rodeo. It was only June, they were at their third rodeo, and Jim was already in the arranging phase and hadn’t taken more than ten pictures that she thought were worth looking at. She felt scared and had no idea what she would do.

But almost as soon as she ceased crying, the depression left her. She wiped her face on the hem of the terry-cloth bathrobe and looked across the empty street, where there was a Pontiac agency with three gleaming cars spotlighted on the floor. She could be all wrong about it, she decided. Jim was smart and sensitive, perhaps he would become a good photographer. Perhaps he really needed to rearrange the files. Even if he didn’t become a photographer he might hit on the field that suited him sooner or later. It was cowardly of her to become discouraged when he had had only three tries. It was all her own deficiency—she lacked faith in him. Even if he never found a field and just kept skipping from hobby to hobby, would that be so terrible? What would it mean for them? She didn’t know, didn’t know at all.

Sighing, she slipped off her robe. She hated the sense that she was becoming neurotic, slipping off into gloomy vapors; it was too silly and too self-pitying and she had nothing at all to pity herself for except that she wanted to have a baby and Jim didn’t, and even that would probably work itself out soon. When she was in such moods she longed for something to lift her out of them, some purely physical sensation: heat or cold, to dance, to eat. Beneath her was a literal swimming pool, full of cold water. Bracing her hands on the edge of the pool, she began to lower herself into it slowly, watching the water as it came up her white legs to her knees, her thighs, her hips. When her hips went under, the sluice of water over the bikini bottom was very chilling, and goose bumps came out all over her upper body. The waterline was just below her navel, and she stopped it there for a second, enjoying the sensation of cold even though she wanted to turn loose and swim to warm herself. It made her shiver.

The bikini she had bought in Houston, on a whim. She had always been, if anything, an overly modest girl, given to one-piece suits all through high school and college; but when she had seen the suit in a window in Westbury she had a sudden immodest desire to wear such a suit and had taken it right home and tried it on. It was clearly the sort of suit that went best with a tan, but still she liked it; it made her feel loose and grown up in some way. Jim had been tremendously turned on by it and had tried to take her to bed while she was trying it on. It was a chink in the wall of her modesty, and he welcomed all chinks. Somehow the thought that it was the bikini that had prompted the seduction attempt had offended her slightly, and she put him off.

When the cold water had driven all the gloom out of her head she turned and with her hands still on the edge of the pool lowered herself until the water came over her breasts; then she shoved out into the pool and began to swim. For a few minutes she swam back and forth across the little pool in a vigorous but awkward crawl. She had had a good swimming teacher, and a good tennis coach as well, but she still swam awkwardly and played tennis so haphazardly that Jim had several times, in doubles matches, come close to pounding her with exasperation. She liked pools more than she liked swimming.

By the time she had swum four or five lengths she was warm and stopped beneath the diving board to rest, breathing hard. She was not meant for exercise, she decided. As she was resting, Jim came out in his swimming trunks, an old pair of gray trunks that he had swiped from a gym class years before. She considered them as much an affectation as the bourbon, but she was in a more tolerant mood and watched him tiptoe across the gravel, a little glad that he had come to keep her company. When he got to the pool he jumped in feet first, came up, treaded water for a moment, and swam over to her in an even crawl. When he looked up, streams of water ran out of his blond hair onto his chest and shoulders.

“I thought you were going to drown yourself,” he said. He was in good spirits, and he was always sly at such times and infectious.

“My bosom wouldn’t let me sink,” she said. “Want to drive out into the desert and watch the sunrise? It’s supposed to be great.”

Jim ignored the question—it was his way of handling impulsive suggestions of hers that didn’t appeal to him at all. Instead of answering he swam up to her, looked friendly, and began to kiss her. Kissing when their faces were both dripping wet was a bit of a novelty—it was slippery and his skin smelled differently and she compliantly kissed with him awhile, lightly and in fun, the water from her wet hair running off her eyelids and down her cheeks. She was holding on to the edge of the pool with her hands, her arms spread. Jim gradually began to kiss a little bit more than in fun. The bikini had done it again, she supposed. He put his hands on the pool side and wiggled between her legs, bumping at her suggestively while he treaded water.

“Quit,” she said, not annoyed, but at the same time not wishing him to embark on any underwater gymnastics, none involving her, at any rate. She could tell from the bumps that he was feeling sexy and as usual that confused her a little, for while she was approving and a little glad she was also slightly reluctant. And anyway, cars were still passing on the street and the street was only yards away. And anyway, underwater sex was ridiculous even to think about, but Jim had read pornography and thought everything ought to be tried.

“Quit bumping me, please,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t be seduced in a swimming pool even if it were anatomically feasible, and I have a hard enough time keeping this suit on without you bumping me. Just desist for a bit.”

“You have no pioneer spirit,” Jim said. “I like to bump you.”

Patsy put her legs around him and let him hold her up. She sank until only her head was out of the water, her eyes on a level with his chin. “You really don’t want to see the desert sunrise?” she asked.

“Perhaps we can make a trade,” he said, nudging her from below; but it was the sort of remark that didn’t work with her and she ignored it as blithely as he had ignored the original suggestion.

“I saw the clown you like,” he said. “Met his wife, too. She’s a lot younger than him. They want us to come and see them tomorrow.”

“Why not?” she said, not very enthusiastic. She had all but forgotten Pete Tatum. He had been very nice, but the circumstances had been unusual and she had the feeling that under ordinary circumstances they would have little use for each other. She remembered her embarrassment when he had come up to the car without his shirt on as she had been leaving to drive to Abilene. There was no reason why she should have been embarrassed, but the memory of it lessened her enthusiasm for a visit.