Moving On (40 page)

“My childhood was too unliterary,” she said. “I had a nice straightforward right-wing Dallas upbringing. I didn’t even have any traumas. My sister got to have all the traumas. Somehow I think that if I had got to live in Fort Worth I would have had traumas and been morbid about my childhood, like everybody else. Every second person I know seems to have come from Fort Worth and had a dark childhood.”

“I lived there four years,” he said. “Who else do you know from Fort Worth?”

“I did know this rodeo clown and his wife. His name was Pete Tatum. I don’t know if we’ll ever run into them again. His wife is named Boots.”

“You know Pete Tatum?” he asked, looking genuinely surprised for the first time since she’d known him.

“Sure. Do you?”

“His first wife was my aunt,” he said. “My Aunt Marie.”

Patsy was amazed. It was the first time it had occurred to her that it really was a small world, in the sense in which the phrase was normally used.

“She lives in Dumas now,” Hank said. “Her husband owns a grain elevator. I never got to see her much. She was my daddy’s sister and I was raised by my mother’s sisters. They didn’t like Aunt Marie very well.”

They were silent a minute. “Let’s have a little music,” he said. Patsy was agreeable and they went back to the jukebox together. He gallantly offered her first choice of songs and she chose “California Dreaming.” He played “The Gates of Eden,” and it became her turn again. She was about to play a Rolling Stones song when she noticed that there were a couple of Hank Williams songs on the jukebox. “Want to hear your namesake?” she asked. He shrugged, and she played “Cold, Cold Heart” and “The Lovesick Blues,” and they went back to the booth and watched the beer foam drying on their glasses while the songs played. They both felt slightly melancholy but comfortable together. When they went outside they discovered that a norther had just struck. The trees were rustling over the garage when he walked her up the steps to the apartment. Patsy was thinking how strange it was that Hank and Pete should have that connection, a woman named Marie whom neither of them had seen, probably, in many years. And what was stranger still was that she, who had never seen the woman, had found herself in a kind of harmony with two men who had known Marie so differently, one a nephew, one a husband.

“I think Pete mentioned your aunt,” she said, trying to get the key in the lock. “It was about them breaking up, but I don’t remember what he said.”

Just as she got the key in the lock the phone began to ring. She rushed in to get it, missed the light switch, and answered it in the dark. It was Jim, sounding very worried.

“Gosh, have you been calling?” she asked. “Hank and I just had a beer at a place you and he go to. Yum-Yum’s.”

“I just called once,” Jim said. “I was afraid you might have had car trouble.”

“No. I’m sorry I left so abruptly. Your mentor insulted me again, I’m afraid. I do wish you’d find another mentor. You’re sweet to call. How’s the party?”

“Drunken. The Duffins just left. I’m looped enough that I might as well stay until it’s over.”

“Do,” she said. “Apologize to Emma for me. I not only left, I took away Hank. Tell her I’ll send him right back.”

She didn’t push about Duffin—Jim would just resent it. She turned on the bed light by the phone, feeling suddenly awkward. Her husband had disappeared from her mind for an hour—though it seemed like he had been gone for days and weeks—then he had reappeared, his pleasant self. He had sounded very concerned about her. She had been about to ask Hank in. She had an urge to make hot chocolate and wanted him to drink it with her. Perhaps he would really talk to her if she kept trying. Despite Jim’s concern, she still felt lonely. But mightn’t he be jealous if she didn’t send Hank back to the party as she had promised? The idea of Jim jealous was so strange and new that she could hardly imagine it. Except for the one strange moment in Cheyenne when he had seen her throw Pete Tatum a kiss, he had never had the slightest reason to be jealous of her. She felt very uncertain and took a comb out of her purse and combed her hair quickly. It was an entirely new problem, and new problems made her frantic. She and Hank had just begun to get comfortable with each other, and she hated to rush him off. She went back to the door and switched on the porch light. He was sitting on the railing of the landing, his hands in his pockets. The new norther whistled around the corners of the garage.

“You didn’t have to stand out there,” she said. “You could have come in where it’s warm.”

They looked at each other through the screen but could not see each other clearly. It was only when he turned his head and looked away from the garage that the light shone on his angular face. “I don’t call this cold,” he said. “You ought to try a wind like this out where I come from.” He got off the rail, as if to go, but paused a minute on the top step looking toward the country where he came from—the land of northers.

“Homesick?” Patsy asked. That was how he looked.

“I don’t know what for,” he said.

“I was going to ask you in for hot chocolate but I told Jim I’d send you back to the party,” she said.

She had meant to ask him which he would rather do but found she couldn’t. She stood inside the screen, silent and a little impatient. She was not sure he had even heard her, and she did not feel like repeating her remark. He kept looking out into the darkness and it annoyed her; she felt her impatience swelling, and yet when he turned suddenly to face the door she felt a tremor, almost a moment of fright. She looked at him with longing, but all she longed for was someone friendly who liked her, someone to drink hot chocolate with. He looked at her with desire—she knew it, even though she couldn’t see him clearly. If he had stepped inside she would have had to make the hot chocolate and it would have all become scary.

“I’ll run on back to the party,” he said. “Enjoyed the beer, though.” He waved and started down the steps, turning up the collar of his suede coat as he went. Instead of feeling relieved she was once again very impatient with him.

“I wish you’d get another coat,” she said, putting her head out the screen. “I’m sure you could afford a better coat than that.”

Hank turned and looked up at her, quite surprised. “What’s wrong with this one?” he asked.

“Everything,” she said hotly. She was as surprised at her remark as he was. She had not been thinking of the coat until she saw him turn up the collar. Once she had given her views on it she had nothing else to say, and he had nothing to say in retort. There was a strange silence. They looked at each other across the landing, both of them irresolute.

Hank finally grinned and lifted his hands, at a loss for a solution. “You think I should burn it?” he asked.

“Yes, please burn it,” she said, feeling ridiculous. He waved and went on and she went inside and sat on the john for a long time looking at
The Greek Myths
without reading a word. Once her feeling of ridiculousness diminished she felt strangely good—warmer toward the world than she had in some time. When Jim came in at three she was still awake, reading Frazer. He wasn’t too drunk but he was drunk enough to go immediately to sleep. She pulled his arm across her and held his hand against her swelling stomach, feeling quiet, protected, protective, and lucky. Somehow the few odd awkward moments with Hank made being in bed with Jim seem all the cozier. The norther grew stronger, strong enough to rattle the windows of the apartment, and the harder it blew the warmer and drowsier Patsy felt.

8

B
Y THE NEXT EVENING
the norther had blown itself out. The temperature, which had dropped only to the low forties, returned to the seventies, and the heavy December sultriness which sometimes occurred in Houston settled in.

Hank Malory had a date with Clara Clark that evening. They had been seeing each other for six weeks. The only reason he hadn’t taken her to the Hortons’ party was because she had gone with a girl friend who had no date. Clara had initiated it all by asking him to take her surfing. She had no car. Hank had been glad to take her, though the surfing part didn’t work out very well. She had lived on the coast of California all her life and was voluably contemptuous of the gray lukewarm Gulf.

“Mini-waves,” she said, and they never went surfing again. Instead they ate—seafood, usually—saw several movies and a play or two, and finished the evening at Clara’s, in bed. Her apartment was on Bissonnet, scarcely three blocks from his. She was a very attractive twenty-four-year-old redhead and she loved two things completely: herself and California. Except for a mild regret that she was not slightly taller and slightly slimmer, Clara was as nearly satisfied with herself as any human being Hank had ever known. She was quite convinced that she could handle anything that came along—emotional, sexual, or intellectual—and she could. There was no uncertainty in Clara, not in her movements, her speech, her reports and term papers, her orders in restaurants, or her plans for the future. She always knew what she wanted, and one of the things she wanted was a degree good enough to get a teaching job at some junior college in California. She did not particularly want to get married and she could not conceive of living any place but California.

She liked Hank at once. He was attractive and friendly, and didn’t seem to be particularly hung up in any way. She would actually have preferred to sleep with Jim. He was the type of boy she was accustomed to, and he and she had more to say to each other, and she had always been attracted to blond men, for some reason; but she had also twice had things with married men and had found them very harassing. Graduate school was providing all the harassment she needed, so she kept it cool and friendly with Jim. He bought her lots of coffee and complimented her and they talked endlessly, but when it came time to get someone to sleep with she picked Hank. He didn’t have much to say, but he was silent in a relaxing way and it was a relief to go with someone who wasn’t eternally bitching about graduate school. Everyone else felt, or at least declared, that graduate school was really no place for them, that the life was unreal, the projects inane, the themes and theses worthless, the professors disagreeable, the social conventions artificial, the competitions silly. Nonetheless, most of them stayed hermetically sealed in the graduate life, wrote the papers, kowtowed to the professors, plodded through the texts, consumed lakes of coffee a cup at a time, griped, whined, exulted over triumphs so minor they would have been unnoticeable in any other context, competed with one another endlessly, and, by the time they had been at it a few months, would scarcely have known what to do in any other world. To go back into what they liked to refer to as “real life” they would have had to be reconditioned slowly, like divers coming up from the deep.

Hank and Clara both participated in the syndromes of apprentice scholarship, both did fairly well, neither felt particularly bored or particularly griped by the requirements, and neither was nostalgic for any other existence—though Clara did miss California very much. Hank didn’t even have that problem. In comparison to Vietnam, graduate school was an idyll.

On the Saturday evening after the Horton party they saw
The Pumpkin Eater
and were both a little depressed by it. Hank was slightly uncomfortable all evening, wondering if Clara was going to mention his having left the party with Patsy. They were not going steady, officially, but he knew she must have noticed it. Also, Patsy kept occupying his thoughts, and it was strange to sit holding hands with one girl while thinking of another. Clara said nothing about Patsy. After the movie, at her apartment, he sat on her bed watching her strip, wondering what he ought to do. He had a sense, very new to him, that somehow he was not being fair to Clara. She was quite lovely, with rather small breasts but fine legs, and she stripped and hung her clothes in the closet as quickly and methodically as if she were about to put on a bathing suit and go surfing.

“Pooped?” she asked. “You don’t look too spry.”

“Just watching you,” he said, taking off his socks.

She had recovered from her own mild depression and talked brightly while he undressed. Movies seldom moved her—very little
did
move her, though she was not unfeeling. It was as if her needs were purely metabolic; she was too nearly complete, too fully possessed, to need very much emotionally. Food, sleep, a job, sex, pleasant company: those were her needs. She was not dramatic, not neurotic; ultimately, she was athletic. They had made love often and Hank knew what she liked. Part of what she liked was to be on top, the first time. She liked to do a lot of moving herself. That he didn’t mind. He had never known a girl who really liked to be on top and the novelty was enjoyable, though since he was accustomed to being the surfer and not the wave he found it took a little catching on to. But Clara always worked things out to her satisfaction. Then she usually liked to be on the bottom, where she worked things out to her satisfaction a time or two more. Once favorable conditions were provided, she was a natural three-orgasm girl. She saw no reason to try for four—that would have been hubris, or childish, or too tiring—but neither did she feel inclined to stop at two when a third could be had. She was very quick, which was fortunate, since Hank was not normally multiple. He was often amazed at Clara’s proficiency and wondered from time to time if it was simply a unique gift of nature or if perhaps it was something bred into young Californians. Clara seemed to assume the latter.

While they were resting she looked at him with a small good-natured frown. She was perceptive and had no trouble reading the handwriting on the wall. He had his eye on Patsy Carpenter and she saw no point in beating around the bush about it.

“Something tells me you’re not too rabid about being my boy friend any more,” she said. “Am I right?”

Her remark left him at a loss. He was no good at lying, and besides he had not really given the matter very much thought. He felt on the hook and Clara knew it and quickly took him off. She was not a mean girl.