Moving On (33 page)

After the meeting Jim and Flap fell in with a new graduate student whose name was Hank Malory. Flap had met him already and liked him, and Jim found that he liked him too. He was almost as tall as William Duffin but was lank rather than heavy. His nose had a kind of dent in it, as if it had been broken, and his jaw was strong. In talking with him, Jim found out that his nose
had
been broken, and in Vietnam. He had survived a stint as a helicopter pilot and had broken his nose in a car wreck in Saigon the last week he was there. It turned out that he had trained at the training school near Mineral Wells, where Jim and Patsy had seen all the helicopters. His sports coat was old and a bit too short at the sleeves and he took his tie off and stuffed it in his coat pocket as soon as the meeting was over. He came from Portales, New Mexico. The three of them walked off the campus and up the tree-hung streets toward the nearest drugstore, talking of New Mexico, of the redheaded girl in the white net stockings, and of William Duffin. Flap had just checked out Duffin’s latest book, which was on Samuel Beckett, and they passed it from hand to hand as they walked.

They stopped in at the drugstore on the corner of Bissonnet Street and to Jim’s mild embarrassment there was Patsy, barefooted and still in her psychedelic shift, sitting at the soda fountain eating a thick chocolate malt with a spoon and idly reading an issue of
Seventeen
. She had come to the drugstore to mail her letter, and because she was feeling gloomy had gone in to have a malt. She knew most of the soda fountain habitués and could usually find someone to chatter with. If there was no one to chatter with she could at least read magazines free. When she looked around and saw the three men she brightened immediately.

“Gosh, you look great, Patsy,” Flap said. His eyes began to shine. He could never restrain his enthusiasm for her, and Patsy could not help responding to it. She spun half around on the stool, her clean face coloring beautifully and her hair loose at her shoulders—so delighted with their presence that both Flap and Hank Malory were smitten by her and smiled without quite knowing what to say. Jim’s reaction was the opposite. He could not quite look at her and could not help but be a little embarrassed by the fact that she was reading
Seventeen
. It clashed, somehow. The three of them had been talking about Duffin and Beckett and Northrop Frye, though only Flap had actually read the three men, and suddenly there sat Patsy, undetectably pregnant and looking like a schoolgirl on her way home from school, her lips stained a little by the chocolate malt she was eating. Jim was discomfited, but he quickly introduced her to Hank Malory.

“Hi,” Patsy said and immediately began telling Flap about the conversation she had had with Tommy that morning regarding the devil.

“He’s a Miltonist who can’t read yet,” Flap said, sitting down next to her. Jim sat on the other side of her and Hank Malory took the stool just around the corner of the counter. Patsy knew Jim was displeased with her for some reason. He exuded waves of stiffness at such times. To avoid them she turned toward the other men, feeling for a moment disconcerted and slightly hectic. She was caught between the cold rays of annoyance coming from Jim, who was pretending to scan the Beckett book, and the somewhat breathy gusts of Flap’s admiration. Hank Malory had already finished his Coke and was poking with his straw at the ice in his empty glass. He seemed quiet and relaxed and was easier to look at than either Jim or Flap, so Patsy focused on him.

“I bet you’re from the West,” she said. “You’ve got a Western jaw. Months of rodeos taught me to recognize them. You probably even smell from the West.”

Her own remark embarrassed her—it was hardly an appropriate thing to say to a stranger—but he didn’t seem to mind. “I probably do,” he said, grinning as if there were something ironic about what she had said. She found she didn’t like his sports coat, which was suede, and old, and far too hot for Houston.

“A year from now he’ll smell like a bound volume of PMLA,” Flap said. “So will Jim. Ever smell one?”

“I’ve smelled all sorts of books,” Patsy said. She looked quickly at Jim and saw that he was ignoring her and gave the two men a confiding smile, helpless but happy, as if to let them know that even though her husband was ignoring her she was glad they had come. Flap spilled his coffee. He had ached for Patsy for years, and being with her when she was in a good mood made him fidgety with lust. He knew it was hopeless, but he ached, anyway. What he could do was yak with her, and yak they did, Patsy very animated and chattery and quick on the comeback. Hank Malory couldn’t keep his eyes off her—he could not remember when he had seen anyone so lovely or so immediately delightful. They all left the drugstore together and walked down Bissonnet Street, Flap and Patsy ahead, still yakking. Patsy skipped quickly across the hot street and stood cooling her feet on the well-shaded sidewalk, leaving the three men to wait for the next break in the evening traffic. Jim gave Flap the Duffin book before he went to join her.

“Jim was born lucky,” Flap said, noticing that Hank was watching them walk away.

“Must have been,” Hank said. “There sure weren’t any like her in Vietnam.”

When they got home Patsy reminded Jim that they were taking the Hortons out for Mexican food, and evening found the four of them and Hank Malory and Kenny Cambridge, of the beard and Bermuda shorts, at a Mexican restaurant on Alameda Street. It was Jim’s idea to ask Hank, and since Kenny had an apartment two doors from Hank’s they asked him too. The restaurant had a patio with heavy tile-topped tables, excellent food, and huge cool pitchers of beer. The six of them drank lots of beer and enjoyed themselves enormously. As they were eating, it began to rain, softly and levelly, graying the summer evening, blurring the city and the green neon lights across the street. Flecks of rain touched them as they ate. Trucks rumbled by on the street beneath the patio, their tires swishing on the wet pavement. Alameda Street bordered the city’s largest ghetto and lay on an ambulance route, so frequently all conversation had to cease as ambulances screamed by.

“Dead and dying from the bars,” Flap said. “First thing to learn about being a graduate student here is which bars to stay out of.”

“Which ones?” Kenny asked. His beard, like his hair, was reddish brown.

“All of them,” Flap said. “They’re all potential deathtraps. Even if you found one that was empty and went in for a beer someone would probably follow you in and shoot you.”

“Flap’s a little cowardly,” Emma said. She had spruced up a bit and looked pink and pleased and very glad to be out of the house.

Patsy was pleased too. She was wearing her gray dress. Nothing was much pleasanter than company, particularly company that was part old and part new. Part of the fun would be talking over the two new men with Emma at the park next day, but even more of the fun was being there and being the object of two new pairs of admiring male eyes—as she definitely was. Both Hank and Kenny apparently regarded her as a woman worth looking at, for both of them looked at her frequently over their beer or their forks of Mexican food. Jim had forgiven her
Seventeen
and was happier than he had been in the afternoon, but he was still a little put off by the general insouciance and kept trying to steer the talk into literary channels. He wanted to talk about books and scholarship and graduate school. Flap kept trying to needle him out of it.

“For god’s sake,” he said, “you’ve got four or five years in which to sit around analyzing the graduate malaise, not to mention all the particular malaises of this department. Who cares about William Duffin, or his reputation? Screw him, for the moment.”

“His favorite expression,” Emma said, licking her lips.

“Screw you too,” Flap said. “You’re drinking more than me. I’m worried I’ll have to cook breakfast. You shouldn’t drink more than me. It’s bad for our relationship.”

Emma ignored him and poured herself more beer. Kenny Cambridge plucked at his beard and sighed, as if already the rigidities of the graduate life were weighing heavy on his soul.

“There must be safe bars,” he said. “I can’t stand this unless I can get potted regularly. That was a shitty meeting we had today.”

“Sure, but we’re counteracting it right now,” Flap said.

“I’m thinking of quitting already,” Kenny said. “It’s no atmosphere for a writer.”

He struck Patsy as funny and she laughed out loud. Jim looked embarrassed. Hank Malory had said very little. He seemed somewhat remote and a little melancholy, but when Patsy laughed he looked up and smiled. Kenny gulped his beer defensively. Had it been anyone but her he would have been offended, but as it was he was just nervous.

“What do you write?” Patsy asked, to make up for laughing.

“Poems,” Kenny said shyly, looking hopeful. “Do you?”

“No. I just read.” She felt pretty certain she was going to get a chance to read some of Kenny’s poems before very long.

“I don’t think it’s such a bad life for a writer,” Flap said. “You get lots of time to yourself. Of course, I spend all mine drinking coffee with my confreres, but if I didn’t do that I could write. Maybe you’ll have more strength of will than me.”

“Flap used to be a writer too,” Emma said, taking the last tortilla. “He wrote short stories. I was even a writer myself. I wrote short stories. But Flap sent his out. I never sent mine out. For all anybody knows, I’m better than him. If I’d sent mine out somebody might have bought them. Who knows?”

Patsy started to mention Jim’s novel fragment but didn’t. She didn’t think he would want to be counted, somehow.

“Boy, do I like to eat here,” Emma said.

“Houston smells like a crotch,” Kenny said, sniffing the wet air quizzically.

“Male or female?” Flap asked.

It was a novel question. They all tested the smell of Houston against their memories of the smell of crotches. “Female, I think,” Kenny said.

“How about you, Hank?” Patsy asked. “Are you a writer too?”

Hank shook his head, tilting his chair back. It annoyed Patsy a little that he didn’t talk. She had been prepared to like him, and it was hard for her to like someone who didn’t talk. Hank seemed quite content to listen.

“Hemingway wouldn’t have gone to graduate school,” Kenny said glumly. “Norman Mailer wouldn’t either. Can you imagine Norman Mailer in graduate school?”

“Sure,” Emma said. “He’d seduce us all. Us girls, I mean. Me and Patsy, I mean. That would be kicks, eh, Pat?”

“That would be kicks,” Patsy said. She and Emma lifted their glasses to each other. Often they pretended they were Lady Brett. When slightly tight it was a charming thing to pretend. She smiled at Jim, hoping he would start liking the evening better. She wanted him to be in the mood everyone else was in; but he wasn’t really in that mood and there was nothing she could do about it.

Emma patted Jim’s shoulder. She wanted him to be happier too, for Patsy’s sake. “This is fun,” she said. “Let’s go some place and continue it.”

“Sure, come to our place,” Jim said, trying to shake himself out of his feeling of withdrawal. He felt like being alone and reading, actually, but he saw that Patsy was flushed and happy and delighted with the company and he made an effort to change his mood.

“How come you like Norman Mailer?” he asked Kenny. “He’s no poet.”

“I don’t like him so much,” Kenny said. “It just occurred to me that he wouldn’t go to graduate school. I don’t much like prose, actually. It’s all wasteful. I tried to write a paragraph of a novel once and it was all just ordinary words and sentences. It didn’t have any specialness. No élan, no brio, no
joie
, no flair—” and he stopped, embarrassed. He had a habit of reeling off synonyms like a human thesaurus.

“Maybe they’ll let you do a dissertation in couplets,” Flap said.

“I guess I ought to write, if everybody else does,” Patsy said, draining her beer. She had had three glasses of beer and felt light.

“Sure you should,” Flap said. “It’s something everybody starts doing at a certain age, like sex. If you’re old enough to be pregnant you’re old enough to write.”

At the mention of Patsy’s pregnancy Jim suddenly cheered up. He had been feeling very indefinite, very unestablished. But Patsy was pregnant, so he was not completely unestablished. And she looked very fresh and lovely. He put his hand on her shoulder to let her know he liked her. She noticed he was smiling at her and was glad. When they all got up to go to the car she walked with her arm around his waist.

Two hours later, at the Carpenters’, the evening was running down. Kenny Cambridge was mumbling to himself over a bilingual edition of Lorca. He had smoked some pot and was pretending he was reading Spanish. Emma sat spraddle-legged on the floor, burping and wishing fervently that she hadn’t eaten so much. Jim and Flap were looking at all the paperbacks Jim had bought, and Flap was going on about C. S. Lewis and trying to make clear to Jim the difference between drab poetry and golden poetry. They were drinking whiskey, as was Hank Malory. He was idly looking through their record collection. Patsy sat by Emma on the floor.

“I wish he would put something on and dance with me,” Patsy said. “I feel like dancing before I get big.”

“He’s got a nice loose build,” Emma said. “We’re all going to like him. Kenny likes him because he doesn’t write poetry. Flap likes him because he doesn’t look academic. Jim likes him because he doesn’t seem like competition.”

“And you and I like him,” Patsy said, giggling. “Why do you and I like him?”

Emma shrugged. “Because he’s got a nice loose build,” she said.

Patsy decided she must dance, though she was a little unsteady and wove slightly as she crossed the room. “Find anything we could dance to?” she asked.

Hank smiled and lifted his glass cavalierly. “One more little swig and I can dance to anythang,” he said.

“Paul Newman really does that better than you,” she said. “I saw
Hud
too.”

He held up a Hank Williams record that Jim had bought on sale at a drugstore for a dollar ninety-eight. The cover picture showed Hank Williams in a white suit and white hat.