Moving On (21 page)

“Sure, delighted,” Joe said. “Passing through?”

“No, coming especially,” Eleanor said, feeling wild.

“Especially to see
me?
I’m flabbergasted. Why, for god’s sake?”

“Because my father wouldn’t let me date cowboys,” she said. “It had a complicated effect on me.”

“It sure must have,” Joe said. “Well, now that you’ve explained it, come ahead.”

“Do I detect a note of trepidation?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” he said. “What have I got to fear? Neither of us has any reason not to do anything we want to do, that I can see.”

She hung up and that evening they had a good late dinner in a restaurant off La Brea. Eleanor realized as they were eating that she liked Joe Percy very much, and all the sense of harshness and strangeness that she had felt on the flight west left her. She began to feel herself again, and very foolish, and Joe Percy realized it and did his gentlemanly best to make a graceful exit possible for her, but his tact only made Eleanor feel the more confused. He offered to get her a hotel room but she declined. “No,” she said. “Maybe I better try to get a flight back to Dallas. I really don’t know what I thought I was doing.”

“You look a little worn,” Joe said. “I’ve got a perfectly secure guest room you’re welcome to. You can’t get a flight this late.”

Eleanor accepted gratefully. Joe Percy, modestly clad in green pajamas and a blue robe, came to his guest-room door to say good night and found her in bed crying. He came and sat down on the bed and patted her hand and then held it. “Come now,” he said. “Cheer up. I’ll survive the disappointment. I didn’t let myself believe it, anyway.”

“Oh,” Eleanor said. “I’m just distraught. I don’t know what I’ve been doing the last three days. This is the silliest thing I’ve done in years.”

Joe smiled at her. He had good teeth and his mustache worked for him. He was clearly a man who had handled the tears of many women. Eleanor was trembling from her cry and held his hand tightly.

“Maybe you’ve been reading too much Iris Murdoch,” he said. “Your coming out here like this reminds me a little of her stuff. People are always getting into bed with one another out of the blue.”

“No I haven’t,” she said, beginning to feel a little less wretched. “I don’t read very good books, really. I read a lot of magazines.”

Joe chatted with her until she was feeling calm and pleasant. She told him about her ranch. He had seen most of the world but had never been on a really large ranch and she told him he would have to come sometime. He had been in Australia and told her about a couple of old Australian cattlemen he had known and the stories they told. As he was about to leave he bent to give her a light kiss, looked at her quizzically, smiled, and gave her a real kiss. Eleanor found she had been wanting him to. He drew back and gave her his little sly look, frank and merry and sexy, before he kissed her again,

The next morning she sat naked on the bed looking out at the smog-white Hollywood hills. The sheet was around her waist, and she felt heavy and good, uncombed and unkempt, but good. Joe Percy had just come to ask what she wanted for breakfast. He was wearing a pair of red briefs and a blue Hawaiian shirt.

“How’d I get here?” she said. “Did you hypnotize me in Phoenix. You need to lose some weight, you know.”

“Nonsense,” Joe said. “This potbelly is my secret. It was obviously my roly-polyness that got to you.”

“You must have got to me with more than that,” she said, yawning. “I feel downright despoiled.”

“Well, I’d brag about you but nobody would believe me,” Joe said. “They’d think you were a fantasy.”

“Sonny would believe you,” Eleanor said. “He knows my erratic nature. Besides, I told him you were attractive.”

“You did? Somehow I’ve always felt attractive, despite my appearance. How did you contract that horse’s ass? He must be worse than syphilis.”

“No, talk nicely about him,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said at once. “That was thoughtless.”

Eleanor was silent, looking out the window. Joe looked at her and felt sad inside himself, for he would have liked to have seen her right where she was for many mornings, her hair uncombed and her breasts sagging just as they were—and he knew he would probably never see her there again.

“I must say you’ve got your nerve,” she said, noticing his red shorts and grinning at him. “You certainly were greedy.”

“Yep,” Joe said, unabashed. “Get up and let’s eat.”

“I guess I’m glad you are,” she said, pulling the sheet off the bed to hold around her. “Men have always rushed to give me things. Very few have ever dared to grab.”

“Anyone who gets you in reach and doesn’t grab is a fool,” Joe said. “I can’t figure you being single. All your looks, all your dough. How come?”

“Oh, I’m too sleepy to go into it,” she said, yawning again. “Isn’t it almost noon? You’re better than sleeping pills.

“I really said most of it yesterday,” she added, going to the window to look out at the hills. “Daddy wouldn’t let a cowboy near me, or vice versa. There were only about five men in Texas rich enough to marry me when I came of age. The one I married was sixteen years my senior, and queer to boot, though he didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know anything and Daddy paid no attention. He wouldn’t have known it if he had paid attention. He had twelve thousand head of cattle to take care of. My husband and I lived together in honorable wretchedness for eight years and then he killed himself in a rest room of the Adolphus Hotel, in Dallas. It didn’t get in the papers the way it was, I assure you. Three months after Daddy died I met Sonny. He took me off in one of his hearses to a secluded spot in Oak Cliff and I found out what a cowboy was. I found out a lot of things I hadn’t known. I was twenty-nine. All that time I was married I did the conjugal act maybe twice a year. I didn’t know enough to complain, and I had no one to complain to. For weeks after I met Sonny I wouldn’t turn him loose. I couldn’t believe it was me, but I liked it. That’s why I can’t help feeling protective of Sonny. He brought me into being. No one else had the nerve. You can’t imagine how isolating wealth is unless you’ve lived in Texas. There are places where wealth makes people a little more companionable. In Texas it just guarantees you a comfortable loneliness.”

“Have to look Texas over sometime,” he said. “Sounds like a fine place for a novelist
manqué
. Lots of frustration. Hardly anybody screwing readily. There’s too much ready screwing out here—it drains off the poetry of it all.”

“You can have the poetry of it all,” Eleanor said. “You’re going to work, I take it.”

“I have to,” he said. “I’m an underling, comparatively. But I could take you to dinner at an even better restaurant, if you care to hang around.”

“Nope,” she said. He went back to his room and when she had put on a robe she went in. He was dressed in a conservative blue suit. On his dresser was a picture of a woman, a brunette in an off-shoulder dress. Her hair style belonged to the forties. She caught a glimpse of herself in Joe’s mirror—she looked full, even a little overblown. She certainly looked her age.

“God,” she said. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go to bed with either of us. That’s a nice suit.”

Joe Percy turned from tying his tie and looked at her fondly. “Maybe not me, but certainly you,” he said. “Of course, out here you might have problems. Out here you need to be sixteen and weigh about ninety-eight pounds to be considered prime.”

“Your wife was lovely,” she said.

Joe sighed. “Some old girl she was,” he said. “A serial queen, if you can imagine it. She could swing through trees and fall over waterfalls with the best of them. I truly haven’t been the same since she died.”

“What happened?”

“Cancer,” he said. “About ten years ago.”

She looked out the window again. The hills were brown and the smog white as the white houses. It would be nice to arrive home, to fly through the clear plangent evening, with the whole of the Red River Valley spread out below her. She would exchange the neuter smell of Hollywood for the smell of alfalfa and mesquite and perhaps have a word with the cowboys if she got home in time.

“You really won’t stay?” he asked. “I’ll be so bereft without you that I’ll have to get drunk.”

“No,” she said. “I have to go. Anyway, you failed me. I wanted to feel low and wicked. Now I just feel fat and carnal and a little goofy.”

“So?” he said.

“Well, damn,” she said. “You’re too domestic, Joe. You make me feel like I might have made somebody a nice middle-class wife. I don’t want to feel that way now.”

“High romance just ain’t my metier,” Joe said. “I’ve written too many bad situation comedies.” He looked in the mirror and could not help smiling a dapper smile. He turned his irresistible dapper smile on her.

“Quit,” she said. “I don’t want to get comfortable with you. I might marry you. That would throw my directors into a tizzy.”

“You’ve got directors too?”

“Certainly. Daddy never figured I’d have enough sense to run the estate myself. I don’t have much trouble, though. They’re all scared of me.”

They ate the breakfast Joe had fixed, chatting pleasantly. “You really will have to visit,” Eleanor said. “I want you to meet Lucy, my maid. The two of you ought to be exposed to one another. She has a wit not unlike yours.” After breakfast Joe put on a driving cap and they kissed lightly at the door, as if they had been married ten years and had just remembered that they were fond of each other. He drove off in a Morgan with red seats, and Eleanor had more coffee and drank it while looking at his pictures and his books. She made the guest-room bed, called a cab, and when she got home that evening the bullbats were swooping over the long lake in the horse pasture, the cowboys were unsaddling at the barn, and her two dairymen were just turning the Jerseys into the oatfield for the night. She ate some cold shrimp while Lucy solemnly filled her in on the doings of the week. They prated awhile and Eleanor went to bed with the magazines that had accumulated in her absence. She didn’t leave the ranch again for almost three months.

14

“Y
OU’RE GETTING SEXIER
,” Jim said, kissing her shoulder. Her shoulders were freckled from much sitting around swimming pools. Patsy glanced at him. She was in bed filing a nail. He had just showered and was suddenly there at her side, sexually aroused.

“I’m busy,” she said pleasantly. “Take it away.” But Jim went on kissing her shoulders—it was really more ticklish than sexy. “A minute,” she said as he was turning her toward him to really kiss her. Just before he did, she managed to burp. She had been next door to a drive-in and had had a vanilla milkshake. Her burp tasted of milkshake and she could not really enjoy the kiss because she needed to burp again and was afraid she would. Still, matters went pleasantly enough. Jim had been off visiting a ranch for three days, rising early and working hard, and passed quickly from coming into sleep. Patsy made it belatedly and not very strongly—a short quiver of pleasure, quickly gone—but Jim was not awake to resent anything and she calmed quickly and didn’t care.

She slipped from beneath him and lay with her chin on her arms and her arms on Jim’s back, looking across him. Through the window she could see the green neon sign of their motel and the shallow end of a swimming pool. She was in no turmoil but felt vaguely bothered by the feeling that nothing in her life was ever going to be terribly intense. She would have liked sex better if it made her drowsy more often. She disliked being awake afterward, alone and thinking. She had always supposed she would lead an intense life, one way or another, but it just wasn’t working out that way. She wasn’t starving, but neither was she feasting. Her sensations weren’t very intense, her emotions weren’t very intense, even her imaginings had ceased to be very intense. As usual at such times, her thoughts turned to babies. A baby would surely make for joy. She rubbed her hand fondly up and down her sleeping husband’s back, for he had agreed two weeks before that they should have one. She might be pregnant already. And conditions for parenthood seemed very opportune. She was convinced that Jim was about through with photography—his enthusiasm was waning visibly. By the end of the summer he would be ready to try something more settled, and he was always at a peak of enthusiasm about life when he was starting something new. It would be a good time to be starting a baby. Besides, it had begun to seem to her that fatherhood might be what he was best at.

They were in Ogden, Utah, after almost a month of lonely circling through the West. The tying-up incident in Phoenix had scared them both. Jim had come in rumpled and guilty-looking from his night on Sonny’s couch, and when Patsy told him about what Sonny had done he grew very depressed and they drew together and decided to split off from the pro rodeo circuit for a time. They started to Provo, Utah, where everyone else was going, but after several inconclusive arguments about whether or not Sonny was really dangerous they turned and went to Idaho instead. Jim was gloomy and troubled the whole trip. He liked Sonny and hated the complications of it all. They decided that the best thing to do was hunt out small amateur rodeos for a time and avoid the anxiety that having Sonny around would be sure to produce.

They went north through Idaho as far as Coeur d’Alene, then cut back through Montana to Missoula, went up to Great Falls, down to Billings, on down to Jackson, Wyoming, then up again to Miles City, to Bismarck, North Dakota, down again through South Dakota to Mobridge and Pierre, cut through a corner of Nebraska and slowed for a time in Colorado. Whenever they saw a rodeo poster they made a side trip if necessary. To her surprise Patsy found that she liked the country they were traveling through. Except for one childhood trip to Yellowstone she had never been in the high West, and she liked it. The towns they stayed in were another matter, for once they left the circuit, Jim developed almost an obsession for staying in the smallest towns he could find, towns even the chain motels had not heard of. They stayed in Grangeville, Mobridge, Killdeer, Swift Current, Cody, Belle Fourche, Pagosa Springs, St. Onge. Accommodations tended to be weird—it was Patsy’s word. “Don’t call this primitive,” she said one night. They were in an old railroad hotel in Nebraska and a train had come through and had seemed to pass right underneath them. “Primitive life was never this noisy.”