Moving On (36 page)

When she turned around with the glass of water in her hand William Duffin stood in the kitchen doorway watching her. She felt embarrassed, as if perhaps she should not have entered the kitchen without asking. Duffin had loosened his tie and was clearly a little too warm, even though the house was centrally air-conditioned. He was a very tall man and looked more formidable alone than he had in the living room.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “I needed a drink of water.”

“You’re awfully pretty,” Bill said. “Let’s go out in the back yard and neck.”

Patsy was so surprised and shocked that for a moment she couldn’t speak. She simply looked at him. He smiled good-naturedly.

“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “Really. Why should I stand around dispensing social and professional banalities when what I really want to do is drag you out in the back yard and kiss you? I might as well be my licentious but attractive self.” He had dropped his portentous lecturer’s tone and spoke quietly and directly. For some reason the change in tone helped Patsy to recover her poise.

“Who says you have an attractive self?” she asked.

“Every woman I’ve ever slept with. Everyone except my wife, at least.”

“Evidently your wife knows you best,” Patsy said, setting her glass down. “I don’t think you’re so attractive. If you were two feet shorter and if your hair was curly instead of being too straight you’d look exactly like Eddie Fisher. Can you sing?”

Bill Duffin looked at her silently, as surprised by her remark as she had been by his proposition. She was looking at the Klee print that was thumbtacked over the stove.

“I guess I underestimated you,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Surely,” she said, thinking perhaps he was drunker than he looked. She was in no mood to make a scene. The insult had actually pepped her up a little—it was a break in an otherwise boring evening. But Bill Duffin didn’t move out of the door.

“Are you and your husband wealthy?” he asked. “That’s a nice dress you’re wearing.”

“We’re not starving,” she said, standing up. “Excuse me, please.”

“Sit a minute,” he said. “I don’t think you really considered my invitation on its merits.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Enough’s enough. You know I’m married.”

“He doesn’t have much of an identity, does he?” Bill said, looking her in the eye. Patsy colored.

“If this is identity you’re exhibiting I’m glad he lacks it,” she said.

Bill was an excellent judge of how far was far enough, and he raised his glass to her. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll excuse you if you’ll excuse me. I’m just impulsive and you looked kissable. My perceptions are probably dulled by drink.”

Patsy went straight to Jim and told him she wasn’t feeling well—could they go? Once they had paid their respects and were outside he asked her what was the matter.

“I just met the Sonny Shanks of the scholarly world,” she said.

“Duffin? What do you mean?”

She told him as they walked. It was a clear pleasant night and their apartment was only a few blocks away. When she finished, Jim said nothing. Silence grew between them. It grew and grew until they were home. He sat on the couch, she sat in her chair.

“Probably drunk,” Jim said finally.

“I knew you’d say that,” she said. “He wasn’t drunk, he was quite cold-blooded. No wonder she looks so uptight. Living with him she’d have to be.”

Jim regarded her unhappily. “Do you think I’m cold-blooded?” he asked.

Patsy began to take off her hose. “No,” she said. “You’re nice. I wasn’t comparing you to him, for god’s sake.”

“I’m just bothered,” he said. “I was thinking of asking him to be my major professor. He seems to like me.”

“Well don’t,” she said. “He likes me more.”

Jim was silent, very depressed. Talking books with Duffin had excited him. He watched Patsy take off her hose, at a loss as to what to do. Marriage seemed to flatten his every expectation, but it had seldom flattened one so quickly. He looked at the shelf of quality paperbacks with dull dissatisfaction and went to get himself a glass of milk.

When the students were gone, Bill Duffin wrote out an order for two books, one by Lawrence Durrell and one by Oliver St. John Gogarty. He put an airmail stamp on the envelope and put the book catalogue in a neat stack he kept on the bottom of the bookcase near his desk. Lee came into the study in a white cotton nightgown and stood watching him.

“You look like Joan of Arc,” he said. “It’s your hair.”

“I feel like her too. I know what it is to burn.”

“Play with yourself,” he said, smiling up at her. “I don’t mind.”

“What’ll you be doing?”

“Reading ‘Gerontion.’”

“My god,” she said, yawning. “I’d think you’d be as bored with it as you are with me.”

“‘Gerontion’ is ever fresh,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just listen to the record.” He went to the living room and put on the record of Eliot reading and listened to “Gerontion.” Lee went to bed and tried to read
The Hobbit
. Their oldest daughter, Melissa, was just then very big on it. She went to Mills College, in California, and they were practically certain that she had begun to smoke pot.

5

“I
DON’T SEE ANYTHING SO BAD
about them,” Emma said, yawning. She was in her gown and an old flannel bathrobe and was watching the Johnny Carson show. Flap had just returned from taking the baby-sitter home. The party at the Duffins’ had left him darkly depressed. Flap was normally cheerful, but when he got depressed he got very depressed, and it seemed to Emma that it was happening more often.

“You’re the world’s last optimist,” he said, switching the TV to the late show, which was a Maria Montez movie called
Tangier
.

“They don’t seem any worse than any other middle-aged couple,” Emma said. “At least they’re both smart. I thought you were glad Rice was finally getting someone like him. It was all you talked about for months.”

“I didn’t foresee him being a prick,” Flap said. He went and got himself a beer and sat down on the couch by Emma, taking off his tie.

“Want to watch the movie or Johnny Carson?”

“Oh, the movie awhile, I guess. Let me have a sip of beer.”

“I think Mrs. Duffin’s getting worried she’s too old, or something,” Emma said. “She’s a little tight under all that poise. I guess having a handsome husband who teaches young darlings all day would be worrisome when you got to her age. I’ll probably be that way when you’re a famous professor and I’m forty. Only she’s thin and I’II be fat.”

“He’s not so handsome,” Flap said.

“I thought he was.”

“Anyway, he doesn’t teach many girls. He mostly teaches hung-up graduate types like me and Jim.”

“I thought you said he was good.”

“He is good. I just don’t trust him.”

“You’re paranoid. I like the movie better.”

Flap got up and switched back and went and got another beer. His depression was lifting a little.

“He’s the type who’ll make trouble just for the hell of it,” he said. “I saw him follow Patsy out to the kitchen. Next thing you know he’ll be trying to screw her.”

“Well, so what?” Emma said, rumpling his hair jovially. “Everybody tries to screw Patsy. I don’t think you have any room to talk.”

Flap grinned sheepishly. “Do you have to preface every remark you make with ‘Well’?” he asked.

“No,” Emma said. “That was the first remark I’d prefaced with ‘well’ all evening. Don’t evade my accusation.”

“I can’t help it if I’m a flirt,” Flap said.

Emma yawned again. “It’s a good thing she doesn’t take you seriously,” she said. “She won’t take William Duffin seriously, either. Let’s have Hank over for dinner this weekend. Now there’s a guy I could take seriously, if the chance arose.”

“Okay,” Flap said, yawning too. Emma was lying rather spraddled out on their old green couch. Flap glanced up her gown and saw the crotch of her white panties. Idly he lifted one of her legs across his lap and began to rub her with one hand. “Want to ask Jim and Patsy too?” he asked.

“I guess,” Emma said, closing her eyes. She opened her legs even further, to facilitate being rubbed. On the screen Sabu was serenading Maria Montez, who was about to lose her heart to a hard-bitten newspaperman.

“Maybe Duffin won’t bother me,” Flap said. “I’m not in his century. Why would he bother a nineteenth-century man?”

“I admit the Rolling Stones were an affectation,” Emma said.

“I’ve seen this movie. The villain gets killed in the elevator. He’s a Nazi war criminal.”

They heard a cough and both were silent. “Teddy,” Emma said. “That sitter covers them up too much. She always has. It’s a bad Southern habit, smothering kids.” They listened, but he coughed only a couple of times and was silent. They relaxed again and Flap continued his stroking.

“Do that some more,” Emma said, settling her hips a little. Flap did it for a while and then abruptly got aroused. “Hey, want the TV off?” he asked, standing up.

“It doesn’t matter, I’m not watching it,” Emma said, pulling up her robe and gown. When Flap got eager, he got very eager, and there was no such thing as getting it home too quickly. He took just time enough to drop his pants and switch off the light by the couch. The glow from the TV screen lit Emma’s large hips and her loins, but Flap was not one to sit and look. He liked the way she smelled behind the ears, and the way her throat smelled. They soon grew very hot, for Flap still had his sports coat on and Emma her gown and robe. Her face was pink and sweating. Neither of them cared. When Flap came, Emma raised her legs and reached under him with one hand so she could hold his balls against her—it was a thing she really liked to do. Flap gave her a few soft little socks and, as always, was surprised, even worried, by the sound she made when she came. He knew it was only pleasure breaking through, but it was so like a sob that until her quietening grateful sighs followed it he was afraid to lift his face from her hair, fearful that he had goofed or hurt her somehow. They went almost to sleep, Flap comfortable between her ample thighs, and were brought back to themselves by a Dodge commercial. Besides being very rumpled, they were confronted with their usual problem: no Kleenex in reach and a fair amount of sperm ready to dribble out on the couch—an object which had already received an embarrassing number of dribblings.

“Well, hell,” Flap said. “Here we are again. I can’t reach my handkerchief without coming out.”

“You don’t have a handkerchief, anyway,” Emma said, feeling around behind her head with one hand, hoping to find something useful on the radio table by the couch.

“Why don’t we ever manage to get to bed?” she wondered, sighing.

“The fault of television. Find anything?”

“No. Go on. Who cares?” He went. “Eech,” she said, covering herself with one hand. She went to the bathroom and Flap sat on the couch and took his shoes off. His left sock had a hole in the toe. Teddy began to cough again, and Emma came back in, in just her gown, with a washrag. She did what she could for the couch.

“Want some coffee?” she asked.

“No. I want another beer. My sock’s got a hole in the toe.”

“If you’d cut your toenails once in a while they wouldn’t cut holes in your socks.”

“You never remind me,” he said.

Emma brought him a beer and made some coffee for herself. She got her sewing box and sewed up the hole in his sock. “I’ll forget it and it will get too big if I don’t do it right now,” she said. They watched what was left of the late show and listened to Teddy’s intermittent coughing. “If he’s got fever in the morning we’re canning that sitter,” Emma said, yawning more broadly. “Let’s go to bed.”

“I want to see the elevator crash,” Flap said. “Go on to bed if you want to. I ought to read some eighteenth century, anyway.”

Emma got out of the chair and came over and sat by him. She ruffled his hair again, yawning. Preston Foster was the Nazi. “I guess I’ll wait for you,” she said.

6

“I
DON’T BELIEVE IT
,” Patsy said. “You couldn’t be that stupid.” She was staring at Jim, injury in her face, and he sat at the kitchen table holding a book in his hands as if to protect it from her.

“There was nothing stupid about it. I asked Duffin and he said it was a good buy and a good book to start with,”

“To start what with?”

“A collection of the Beats.”

“Oh, shit,” Patsy said and began to weep. She put her face on her fists and tears ran down her wrists and arms and off the crease of her elbows onto the blue tableloth. Jim watched bitterly.

“What are you crying about?” he said. “So I bought some expensive books. Why not? I’ve got the money. Why shouldn’t I spend it?”

“We haven’t even paid the doctor for the baby,” she said, sniffing. “We sweltered all fall without an air conditioner. You don’t even want me to buy new dresses. We don’t even go out and eat. We don’t even go to the movies. And you spend forty dollars on a book we’ve already got, just to please William Duffin.”

The book was a first edition of
Howl
, a copy that had belonged to a friend of Ginsberg’s, for whom he had written in the words that had been censored out of the original text. Jim had bought it from the catalogue of a book dealer in Florida and had patiently explained to Patsy what an important, unique copy it was; but the minute she had heard the price she became furious.

“I don’t care what edition it is,” she said. “Why should you squander forty dollars just to get the word f-u-c-k written a time or two in Allen Ginsberg’s hand? I could have written it in our old copy for nothing.”

“You won’t even say it,” Jim said. “Fat chance you’d write it.”

“You shut up,” she said, slinging tears off her face.

There was a neat pile of books on the table, a hundred and forty dollars’ worth in all, and when she slung the tears Jim reached over and moved the books. Patsy looked at him contemptuously.

“Maybe I’ve forgotten what the word means,” she said. “We haven’t done it in months. Even if I am pregnant I don’t think I’m that ugly. You just don’t like to touch me any more.”