Moving On (41 page)

“I just asked,” she said. “Don’t look so pained. It’s no tragedy—don’t look so blue.”

“I’m not blue,” he said. “I’m puzzled.”

“I don’t know why you should be,” Clara said. “It’s no big mystery. You just want to fall in love, and it isn’t happening with us. I saw you looking at Jim’s wife. I’m sure she’d be great-looking if she wasn’t pregnant, why shouldn’t you fall in love with her? I’m just not much on love, really. Maybe I grew up too fast. I was heartbroken twice before I was sixteen, I mean I was
heartbroken
. I don’t see how I could ever be that way again. It just means you get put down sooner or later. It seems kinda childish to me, but there’s no point in knocking it. Too many people go for it.”

“I’ve never been in love,” Hank said truthfully. “I don’t know if I’ll go for it or not.”

Clara sat up and straightened out her hair. “It leads to marriage, I’ve noticed,” she said. After sex she seemed to become older; it was then that she talked with the greatest precision and clarity. She was sexually greedy without being particularly tender, but release brought out what gentleness there was in her, and her intelligence, normally rather programmatic, became more whimsical.

“Or else there’s already a marriage and it leads to problems,” she said. “I used to screw married guys—twice I got into that. They were from the Midwest, both of them. I pass on the Midwest. Both of them wanted to leave their wives and marry me. Why should they want to leave their wives just because they liked to screw me? Their wives were nice girls—I knew them both. I tried to persuade the guys to regard me as a little vacation, but they couldn’t see it that way. It had to be the big show or nothing.”

“Maybe I’ve got Midwestern blood in me,” Hank said.

“You’re not rabidly Midwestern,” Clara said. She grinned at him critically. “You should have been a cowboy,” she said. “You’re great when you don’t have to make conversation.”

“I’ve never known anyone who talked,” he said. “I’m just now learning. Don’t rush me so.”

But Clara was looking serious again. “You know, I think Dr. Duffin’s getting a thing for me, maybe. He’s taken me to coffee twice. What do you think I should do?”

“Run.”

“Why?”

He shrugged, not sure.

“It’s probably good advice,” Clara said. “I trust your instincts, and I can tell you aren’t jealous. If I thought you were jealous I wouldn’t pay any attention to your advice.”

There was a keen look of concentration on her face as she considered William Duffin. Hank had seen the same look on her face the day before when she was trying to decide whether to do her Chaucer paper on the “Knight’s Tale” or the “Prioress’s Tale.” She reached out and held his genitals, still thinking. “You know me,” she said. “So far as I’m concerned the horn is always greener on the other guy. He looks fine to me. But he’s not just a guy, exactly. It’s the repercussions you have to consider. If it didn’t work out he might put the screws on me, you know, and he’s in a position where he can put screws on people. What if he turned out to like to do that sort of thing? I basically don’t understand men of an older generation.”

“That’s a small problem,” Hank said. “I don’t understand women of any generation. Think of all the trouble that’s apt to get me into.”

Clara shook her head. “You don’t particularly need a woman you understand,” she said. “I don’t think you want one. That’s our only problem. You’re the romantic type and I’m not. You probably really crave guilt and mystery and all that sort of stuff. I’m too simple for you, I guess. You’re not a type who just goes in for fucking. You do sort of want the big show. Well, maybe you’ll get it with what’s-her-name.” And she smiled coyly. “I can never remember the names of wives of husbands I want to sleep with,” she said.

“Jim seems very intellectual right now,” she added, frowning. There were an awfully lot of nice men in the world. The complex of possibility was sometimes almost scary.

“You could get Flap,” Hank said. “Since we’re speculating.”

“Naw, he digs his wife,” Clara said. “Maybe I’ll get Dr. Duffin, if I have the nerve.”

She stepped in and took a quick shower while he was dressing. Hank sat in a chair and opened a book called
Paradise Lost As Myth
, which he was supposed to read as soon as she got through with it. Clara came out and stood by her dresser, sprinkling baby powder into her pubic hair. She took off her shower cap and held it over his head, so that a few drops of water dripped on him. Her hair was long, almost to her shoulder blades. “Bring me that Skeat tomorrow,” she said. “I need to get started on my Chaucer paper before I go home for Christmas.”

“Okay,” Hank said. “Can I borrow this book overnight?”

“Sure. Hungry?”

“No.”

“I am,” she said, going to the kitchenette, her panties in her hand. “Don’t forget the Skeat—I really need it.”

“I won’t,” Hank said. He went in and gave her a light kiss and went to the door. She looked at him blithely and stepped into her panties gracefully, all balance, a surfer who had left her native surf. She was unscrewing the top of a peanut butter jar when he went out. A moment later, as she spread the peanut butter on a piece of bread, a frown crossed her face and she felt a touch of depression. Hank was nice. He didn’t strike her as being the brightest boy she had ever known, but he was certainly a fine lay. She was not sure where she was going to find his equal. In California it would have been no problem, but then she wasn’t in California. It depressed her for half an hour, but the sandwich and a Sprite helped her to shrug it off. Someone would turn up. Someone always had.

9

“Q
UIT BITCHING
about it,” Jim said grimly. “It’s over and it wasn’t so bad. There are two things I really hate to do. I hate to drive on bad roads in holiday traffic and I hate to listen to you bitch while I’m driving on bad roads in holiday traffic. Please shut up so I can have a happy New Year.”

They had been to Dallas for Christmas and were returning to Houston. As far ahead as they could see, the narrow two-lane highway was clogged with slow-moving cars and trucks. The day was gray and chilly and the heater on the Ford was broken. It had been so warm in Houston that Jim had neglected to get it fixed. Patsy was swathed almost to the neck in a twenty-year-old fur coat that her mother had passed down to her a few years before. It had been the first real present her father had bought her mother when it had become apparent that he was getting rich. That had been in the forties, and the coat was fairly shabby. Patsy called it her Creature. When she sank down into it, as she had, it was hard to tell where the coat stopped and she began.

“You’re very gruff,” she said. “I get to bitch if I want to. I certainly get to bitch about my own Christmas if I want to. My bitching about Christmas is a ritual, and if you expect to live with me successfully you had better get used to it.”

“You better outgrow it by next year,” Jim said. “I want our children to have merry Christmases.”

“Children!” Patsy said vehemently. “That’s a laugh. Where would we get children? I refuse to adopt one and it may be years before you get time to father another on me, even if you have the inclination. I’m not complaining, though. I recognize the claims of scholarship. Don’t worry about me—write some more papers. Pretty soon I’ll learn to efface myself completely.” And she sank an inch lower into her coat.

“For god’s sake,” Jim said. “How can anyone be so insecure?”

“Me? Insecure?” Patsy said, coming up two inches. She peered at him over the collar of the Creature. Jim looked at her for a second and almost rammed the truck in front of them. The truck had a bulldozer on it.

“Okay, okay,” Patsy said. “I’m insecure. Forget about me. I don’t want our family wiped out just yet, wretched though we are.”

“I enjoyed Christmas,” Jim said. “I like your family. They’re just like most people’s families. At least they make an effort. Mine just run away.”

His had gone to Yucatan—they always went south for Christmas. Patsy snuggled down into the Creature and looked out at the gray grass and scrubby trees, trying to imagine how it would be to spend Christmas on a white beach, where the water was very blue. She decided it wouldn’t be any good unless she could wear her bikini, and she was considerably too pregnant for a bikini just then.

“I’m not just bitching,” she said. “My parents depress me terribly, if I really think about them. The only way I can help being depressed about them is to avoid them. Such sad lives they lead. Why is it somehow worse when people won’t admit that they’re sad? We could never be that sad, could we, old pard?”

Moved by a sudden impulse to be close to him, she scooted across the seat and put her head against his shoulder. She slipped one hand inside his shirt and rubbed his chest. Jim was moved, glad. He had lost the ability to draw her close to him by his own efforts and was always delighted when she came close of her own accord. He took one hand off the wheel and stroked her cheek.

“They do lead pretty awful lives,” he said. “It just doesn’t do any good to analyze it that I can see. We can’t change them now.”

“At least yours like to travel,” she said. She kissed his palm and just as she did a car full of Negroes passed them and recklessly cut in ahead. Patsy shut her eyes.

“Mine travel without really liking it at all,” she said. “I don’t think they were always that way. When do we get to the freeway?”

“Thirty more minutes,” Jim said.

Patsy kept her eyes closed, casting back in her memory for when her father and mother had been different. Her father’s name was Garland White; his father had owned a country hardware store in Denison. Her mother’s name was Jeanette;
her
father had repaired windmills and windchargers. Garland and Jeanette married in the mid-thirties and moved to Oak Cliff, then a rough suburb of Dallas. Patsy vaguely remembered the little one-story box of a house they lived in, for they were only normal broke oil people then. Garland worked in the East Texas oil camps. What Patsy remembered most clearly was how different her parents’ clothes had been then: khakis, blue sweat-smelling work shirts, thin print dresses, cheap underthings. She had liked as a girl to sit in the laundry basket on the tiny back porch. One of the few things she remembered with nostalgia was the smell of the porch and the unlaundered clothes. The only other memory she had of Oak Cliff was of a row of washer holes in the bare dirt of the back yard, for Garland liked to pitch washers with the neighbors in the evening. Patsy remembered how the washers clinked as they dropped. There were domino games too, and she and her earliest friends chased lightning bugs while the men hurrahed and drank beer and the women sat on straw-bottomed chairs talking about their families.

Years later, in college, when her friends grew nostalgic about the past—about washer pitching or lightning bugs or old comic books or radio shows—Patsy felt puzzled and a little disquieted, for the memory of such things stirred no emotion in her. What moved her was the memory of how much friendlier her mother and father had been in the days when they did their own laundry, but she could never be really sure that the memory was not just a fantasy of her own.

Garland had a heart condition that should have killed him but didn’t. It made him florid, made Jeanette permanently anxious, but it had kept him out of the war. He went in with another man and bought a cheap oil rig and by the time the war was over was a small millionaire. Patsy started school in Highland Park, not Oak Cliff. Jeanette was a simple soul. In twenty years of practice she never mastered the game of bridge. Church was the only thing she felt good at. Garland gave up washer pitching for golf, joined two country clubs, bought a little ranch and a little airplane; he tried his level best to learn how to enjoy himself. He failed—but he kept trying. He worked harder at fun than he did at the oil business, but he had come to the oil business at just the right time and had just enough energy and enough judgment to keep himself in the money. It was small money, as oil money went, but it was enough to confuse him. He learned to drink, seldom got seriously drunk but got slightly drunk often enough that Jeanette began a ritual complaint—a complaint that Garland found stabilizing, on the whole. He would not have known what to do with a wife who didn’t complain about her husband’s drinking.

On Christmas Eve, two days before, Jeanette had had a long fit of weeping, all over Miri, who had inexplicably refused to come home for Christmas. She had called and been pleasant, but had simply refused to come home. The excuse she gave was term papers. but it didn’t convince Garland or Jeanette or Patsy either, though Patsy didn’t care. She was convinced she could have got the real reason out of Miri but, with her parents on the extensions, had no chance to. After supper Jeanette had broken up—it was the first Christmas the family had been separated. She wanted to fly out and find out what was the matter, but she was afraid to. Miri had a rebellious spirit and was very apt not to welcome a visit, and in any case Jeanette was afraid of what she might find.

“What if she’s pregnant?” she wept. “What other reason could she have for not wanting to see us on Christmas?”

“She could just be bored with Christmas,” Patsy said. “It’s a possible human emotion. If you ever spent a Christmas away somewhere, without all this trapping, you might find you loved it. It doesn’t mean she’s forsaken us forever. Don’t cry so.”

“She may be living dishonorably,” Jeanette said. “And be pregnant too.”

“Probably not both,” Patsy said. “Girls who live dishonorably usually do it sensibly these days.”

“She might even be smoking marijuana,” Jeanette said, looking to Garland for support. He was wandering around the room in a stiff new Christmas suit, drinking Scotch.

“Bad influences out there,” he said. “It’s my damn fault. I should have kept her at SMU.” Miri had had an early and disastrous marriage, lasting three months, and since then neither Garland nor Jeanette had quite known what to do with her.

“You hush,” Patsy said to her father. “She’s probably not pregnant and she hasn’t had time to get on heroin or anything. It’s only been one semester. My god. If you’d kept her at SMU she’d be mentally paralyzed by now. She sounded just fine to me.”