Moving On (16 page)

“What’s cowboyism?” Jim asked lightly. He was sitting on the floor putting his pictures back in the file cases.

“I beg your pardon?”

“For shit’s sake,” he said, though still lightly. “You hardly know them. They may not be great minds but they’re perfectly likable. Just because they didn’t show up the minute you wanted them to, you make up some vague bitchy label that doesn’t really mean anything, even to you. Maybe they wanted to make love or something. Maybe he really did have to train his donkey. You told them to come any time, so what difference does it make?”

He was sitting with his back to her as he spoke, and Patsy considered his back gravely, wondering how it would really be to plunge a knife into someone’s back. But she knew that Jim was right: she was merely bored and being bitchy, and she didn’t want a quarrel, at least not wholeheartedly.

“So I’m bitchy and smarty,” she said. “You have no right to complain now. Besides, what I said about them was true—it was just fallibly put. I do like them. I’m no snob. You’re the essence of vagueness yourself and you have no right to criticize my terminology.”

“Boodly-boodly,” Jim said. “I’ll criticize all I want to.”

Patsy felt it was surely not possible for life to be any vaguer and duller than it was at moment. She lay on the bed with her chin on her wrists staring at the little brown dressing table. Through the open door of the bathroom she could see the white end of a motel towel that had been dropped in the shower. Jim had the annoying habit of drying himself while still in the bath or the shower, and he invariably got at least the ends of the towel wet, if not the whole towel. If he was going to go through life getting all their towels wet what was there to hope for?

“Feel like doing perversities?” she asked with no change of tone.

“What?” Jim asked, not looking around. “Want to do what?”

“Perversities,” Patsy said. “Per as in persimmon, versities as in universities. You know, unconventional activities, like people do in pornography.”

“Oh,” Jim said, sliding pictures into envelopes. “I don’t think you’re serious.”

Patsy didn’t answer. How could she blame him for dismissing the invitation? They had only made love the night before and she had seldom been inclined again so soon. It embarrassed her a good deal even to have said what she said, because she had been more or less serious. While Jim was at the rodeo pens she had peeked into
Sexus
and it had affected her. If life was just going to be a matter of dullness and wet towels and waiting and reading, such things might be worth trying. She was in a mood to accept almost any diversion, and besides she was curious. For him to dismiss her so cursorily, without even glancing around, annoyed her. It was certainly not an invitation she intended to issue twice.

“Why are you so completely vanilla?” she asked.

“Because that’s the way you want me,” he said, not turning around.

“I did to begin with, but maybe I’m changing,” she said. It was true that she had repulsed some experimental attempts on his part early on in their marriage, when she had been easily embarrassed, but it annoyed her that he thought her so static.

“I’m going to be new, dynamic, debased,” she said gloomily.

“You might get a chance tonight. Shanks is giving a party.”

“Oh, god.” She reversed herself instantly. “We’re not going, surely. At least I’m not.”

“Be a great opportunity for the new you,” Jim said.

“Oh, quit baiting me,” she said with a little heat. “I know I’m duller even than you. I give up. I don’t want to go. He’s awful. He’s cowboyism personified. I want to stay home and read.”

“Suit yourself. I’m going. Maybe some cowgirl will seduce me. Then we’ll have some guilt to work with. What our marriage needs is a little guilt.”

“I said hush,” she said. “Don’t talk to me in that vein.”

But they continued to talk in exactly that vein throughout the afternoon. They kept up a running low-grade argument of a sort they were expert at. They couldn’t seem to drop it, but neither did it flare high. When Boots and Pete finally came, Patsy was relieved and quickly forgave them for their tardiness. Pete looked sort of comical in his snipped-off jeans. The late afternoon heat was terrific and the water felt good. Boots dove a lot, not gracefully, but with great energy. She wore a two-piece green suit, not quite so skimpy as Patsy’s bikini.

After a while they all got out and sat on the cement letting themselves drip. It was obvious that Boots at least was very, very happy to be getting married. She sat by Pete and hung on to his arm or his shoulder constantly. Once she kissed him shyly behind the ear. Patsy was amused and a little envious—she would never have kissed Jim behind the ear in public. Pete was relaxed and quiet. He scarcely looked at Patsy and took Boots’s affection gracefully, now and then circling her waist with his arm. It turned out that both of them were from Fort Worth.

“Different sides of town, of course,” Pete said. “Different sides of the track.”

“We’re both from Dallas,” Jim said. “Same side of the track, worse luck.” Patsy was irked by the remark but said nothing. Boots’s father owned a big Dodge agency but spent most of his time racing horses in Colorado. Pete volunteered no information on himself.

They dried and changed and walked down the street to a diner and ate fried ham sandwiches and chocolate icebox pie. Boots thought Jim’s occasional small witticisms were uproariously funny. She laughed so loudly at them that Patsy was at first annoyed and then a little touched. Pete looked at Boots fondly when she laughed and occasionally made some dry response of his own. Once he reached up with a napkin and wiped a bit of mayonnaise off her cheek. Boots was talking to Jim and scarcely noticed, but Patsy observed it and found herself liking Pete more and more. He seemed like a watchful, gentle, very trustworthy sort of man.

When they had eaten, Boots and Jim wandered up the street together, talking about Fort Worth, and Patsy waited for Pete. He had stepped back into the diner to get a toothpick and emerged smiling, the toothpick held between his teeth. To the west the sky was changing color. The two of them walked quietly along the sidewalk for almost a block, hearing Boots’s light rapid voice ahead of them in the dusk.

“You have a nice bride,” Patsy said, though it was not exactly what she had wanted to say. Walking beside him made her realize that he was several inches taller than she was. His appearance was a little contradictory: he was tall and at times seemed lanky, but he had a heavy belly.

“Nicer than I deserve,” he said, glancing at her. Patsy was used to people who put themselves down as a matter of course, but Pete was not putting himself down at all, which made it a very nice thing to say about Boots, she thought. She felt slightly uneasy. Pete did not seem unusually bright and she was used to using brightness as a standard in judging men. There was something to him, even if he wasn’t unusually bright. His walk was not like most men’s. It appeared to be a slouch, but it had a springiness too, so that when he moved he seemed both slow and quick. Walking beside him, she could well understand Boots’s habit of hanging on to him: he looked easier to touch than to talk to. If she could put her arm around his waist as they walked along, there would seem less need for talk.

It did disconcert her that she was so at a loss for small talk with him; it was for her a very rare thing. Since childhood everyone had always made much of her because she said interesting, slightly unusual things; and yet she couldn’t think of a thing to say to Pete that he would be likely to find interesting. Casting about, she thought of Sonny Shanks’s party.

“Will you and Boots be at the party tonight?”

“No. We don’t party much. Who’s having one?”

“Sonny Shanks.”

“Yeah, I forgot. He invited us, sort of.” He frowned and tilted the toothpick down. “Sonny and I can do without one another,” he said.

They stepped off the curb at a corner and just as they did two high school boys in a red Mustang cut sharply around the corner, so close that they had to step back. The car squealed away into the dusk. In stepping back to avoid it, they touched, her arm against his arm. The brief contact startled Patsy and she forgot what she had been about to say. Then she remembered Sonny.

“I don’t like him either,” she said. “He seems to have made a better impression on my husband. Why don’t you like him?”

She had not meant the question to be bold, or probing, but saw at once that it was a mistake. “Oh, it ain’t worth talking about,” he said. His tone was not unfriendly, but there was a strong note of reserve in it. Patsy felt she had accidentally put him off, and she didn’t know how to remedy the matter.

“He used to go with my Aunt Dixie,” she said.

“Dixie McCormack?” Pete asked, surprised. He looked at her with friendly astonishment, and Patsy immediately felt lighter.

“None other. You know her too? Everyone seems to know her.”

“I worked for her husband for about six months one time. Never would have picked you for her niece.”

“Sonny Shanks said exactly the same thing,” she said.

The street lights came on as they were walking. Pete glanced at her and Patsy caught the glance and was a little unsettled. He did seem to like her, and she was glad, but she had no idea why he liked her, or what aspect of her he liked. It was confusing and not altogether pleasant, and she was glad when he and Boots were in the Thunderbird driving away.

After they were gone she stood on the driveway a little while making patterns in the gravel with her foot. Jim put his arms around her waist.

“You see, they’re nice,” he said. “You were just being unfair to them this afternoon.”

“Of course I was,” she said, stepping away from him. It irritated her for him to remind her of it. “I’m a very unfair person. If you haven’t learned that about me yet, what have you learned?”

Jim went in without answering and she stood where she was, watching a white airliner slice gracefully down through the blue evening air.

11

“I
WISH
I
HAD
the will power to stay here,” Patsy said, twisting in front of the mirror so she could see the back of her dress. “I don’t think this dress is right, but then I have no idea what
would
be right for a party Sonny Shanks is giving. If the place is swarming with cowgirls I’m going to look odd.”

“That’s never bothered you before,” Jim said. He wore a red sports shirt and his gray sports coat and had been ready to go to the party for fifteen minutes. He was sitting in a chair leafing through an issue of
Playboy
.

“Hush. Whatever my faults, I seldom look odd.” She had put on a green cotton dress. She liked it but decided it made her look a little too much like a college girl attending a lecture by a famous lecturer. That struck her as being the wrong look for the evening ahead and she shucked the dress off and selected a simple brown sleeveless blouse and a skirt. She had been experimenting with her hair again and as she was bent over taking her slip off one of the slip straps caught on a small hairclip. She struggled for a moment but could not get an arm free to loosen it.

“Help, please,” she said, walking over to where Jim sat. He was actually looking at the Playmate of the Month, not with desire or even admiration, but when he looked up and saw Patsy peering at him trustingly from deep within her slip he felt a little guilty and at once closed the magazine and stood up to help her.

“Looking at cows again,” she said. “No wonder you like rodeos if those are your ideal.” She turned her back and stood waiting for him to free her.

“I was looking at that picture out of professional curiosity,” he said. “Yours are my ideal.” And when he had undone the slip so she could remove it he put his arms around her, his hands on her bosom, and held her against him for a minute. They swayed a little from side to side. It made her feel nicely wanted, nicely touched.

“You’re nice,” she said. “I’d really rather you photographed rodeo cows than
Playboy
cows, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Jim said.

Sonny’s motel was a vast network of two-story structures made of sand-colored brick and arranged in what appeared to be a great square. “It’s a walled city,” Patsy said. She sat in the Ford while Jim went in to get the number and approximate location of Shanks’s room. Three large fountains spurted colored water thirty feet in the air. The water was now orange, now yellow, now blue. When Jim came back he was puzzling over a large sheet of paper.

“His room is about two miles from here as the crow flies,” he said.

It proved to be a corner suite on the upper story, not so hard to find as they had feared. When they rang, a tall expressionless middle-aged man opened the door for them. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit, set off by a neat pink tie; he nodded but didn’t speak when they said hello. He simply left the door open and turned and went across the room to a white chair near the large picture window.

On a rack not far inside the room was the enormous ornate saddle they had glimpsed in the hearse. The saddle horn appeared to be gold-plated and the pommel was covered with silver inlays. The saddle clashed grotesquely with the rest of the suite, which was roomy, nicely lit, and nicely furnished. The picture window looked out on a central courtyard and a large curved pool. There was a double bed in the room, a very large one covered with a blue bedspread. Sonny sat on it cross-legged, a drink in his hand. He was barefooted and wore Levi’s and a red satin shirt. A short, stolid young cowboy sat in a chair nearby and looked at them resentfully when they came in. Sonny uncurled himself from the bed and made Patsy a half-bow.

“The party’s made,” he said. “Never expected you to forgive me.”

“I can’t resist parties,” she said somewhat stiffly.

“You’ll have a Coke and Jim will have what?”

“I’ll have a gin and tonic, if you don’t mind. I can’t stand being predicted.”

“Well, just keep telling me what you can’t stand and little by little I’ll improve,” Sonny said, grinning.