Moving On (43 page)

Patsy shrugged and managed to work a particle of soaked cracker out from between her teeth, pushing with her tongue. Her tongue was milky. She set the glass on top of a paperback of
The Armed Vision
and stood up.

“How would I know about getting clobbered?” she said. “I never get to have primordial experiences like that, living with you. I suppose I might leave you if you hit me, but more than likely I’d just cry.” She stood on tiptoe, her belly large under the green nightgown.

“It was that Miri sounded so flat,” she said. “I think I caught the mood from her. She’s always sparkled so.” She walked over and stood behind his chair and stroked the back of his head for a moment. Then she went to her dresser and rubbed hand lotion into her hands. “I’m too superficial to hate you for long,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.” They did and, what was very rare, went to sleep almost at the same time. When Patsy awoke the next morning Jim looked so nice and handsome and undemanding that she felt she had been a bitch, if not a fool. She got up feeling very cheerful. He was there, and it was another day, a sunny winter day with bluer sky than was usually seen in Houston. She had wheat germ and sausages and when Jim awoke made him sausages and very good French toast and quartered him oranges and sat on the bed with him, reading the paper. When she was really merry it showed in her mouth, her eyes, and her every movement. “Your bosom gets better all the time,” Jim said. She shook them for him a little, provocatively, and then, her behind in the air and her chin on her crossed forearms, went back to reading Dear Abby.

10

T
HE FOLLOWING NIGHT
a norther blew in, bringing clouds with it. The next day, which was the day before New Year’s Eve, Patsy had two unexpected encounters, one in the morning one in the afternoon. Jim was doing a long term paper on
The Cloud of Unknowing;
he departed for the library early and returned from the library late, which left Patsy with a day to fill up by herself. She had ceased to feel like running about the city, and usually divided her days between the apartment and the drugstore. The apartment was cozy and the norther keen, but still she felt like getting out, and she didn’t feel like the drugstore.

The afternoon before, a disturbing thing had happened there. She had gone in, hoping to see Hank Malory. He had not left town for Christmas and she was thinking it would be a good day to ask him over for hot chocolate, although it was sunny and not very cold. He was there, okay, but he was chatting with Clara Clark, and it disconcerted Patsy terribly. It was not unnatural that the two of them should chat, since Clara lived just down the street and was often in the drugstore. Patsy felt slightly inimical to Clara on principle, but she sat down with them and was at first not much bothered. What upset her was the discovery—it came out in the chatter—that Clara had just returned from California, and Hank had gone to the airport to meet her and give her a ride in. Again, that was only natural; it could have been no more than a friendly favor, but it all but spoiled Patsy’s day. Clara seemed remarkably trim and happy and well dressed in a suit that was not wild but was certainly not frumpy either, whereas she herself was at a stage where it was not so easy to look good as it had been. She felt herself outclassed, or outsexed, or out-somethinged, and left before they did in order not to see them leave together.

Very moody, almost crying, she walked down to the Museum of Fine Arts and wandered moodily around for more than an hour, getting more and more tired, but no less reluctant to go home. Jim would not be there. No one would be there, and she would have nothing to do but sit and think about the likelihood that Hank was sleeping with Clara Clark. There was no reason why he shouldn’t be, of course, but for some reason it had never occurred to her that he could be sleeping with anyone. Clara was obviously a good choice—sexy, single, and smart—though finally there was something too brisk about her, Patsy felt. She looked like a good tennis player. She herself was convinced that good tennis players were not very womanly—certainly not voluptuous. She couldn’t play three licks of tennis herself and would have scorned being able to play any better. There was no explanation for her mood, and yet she felt betrayed. She had been convinced for a month or two that Hank liked her better than any woman he knew, and it seemed to her suddenly that it was all her own fantasy, completely unrealistic. He obviously just liked her as a person to chat with once in a while. Clara was certainly his mistress—it was too obvious even to question.

She went home low and weepy, and when Jim returned late in the evening he found her prickly and difficult. She made him go back into the traffic to buy pizza. Later, in bed, he found himself horny and made a sudden attempt on her from the rear. Patsy was reading and kicked him away without a moment’s hesitation.

“Quit mauling me,” she said. “Have you been sleeping with Clara Clark?” For it occurred to her in a flash that Clara, unattached and probably amoral, might have lured more than one man away from her. She sat up and whirled on Jim, who looked guilty and defensive. He had never touched Clara, though he had looked up her dress a time or two at boring points in the Chaucer seminar and had had a number of fantasies in which she was involved.

“Have you gone crazy?” he said. “I was trying to sleep with you. What brought Clara into it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, giving his erection an unwelcoming glare. “Just fold that back up. Or down. Something’s stimulated you. I think it’s very abnormal, this sudden desire you’ve developed to jump on me from behind. Who did you learn that from?”

Jim fell back on his pillow in an attitude of feigned despair, his erection falling with him. “I swear to god,” he said. “You bitch at me if I don’t make love to you and then you bitch at me if I do. Can’t you be consistent. I wasn’t doing anything abnormal.”

“You might have if I hadn’t stopped you,” she said. “Of course I want you to make love to me, what’s that got to do with it? I just don’t want you going near Clara Clark.”

“But I haven’t touched her,” Jim yelled. “You’ve gone out of your head.”

Patsy’s bosom heaved and in a moment she began to sob violently. He sat up and she collapsed against his chest.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” Jim asked, alarmed. He supposed it to be a manifestation of pregnancy and patted her shoulder. “I scarcely even talk to her,” he said. “Just at coffee breaks now and then. Hank dates her, you know.”

Patsy sobbed harder, but in a few minutes her sobs stopped. Jim dried her face. She was quite calm but unmollified.

“I knew she was promiscuous,” she said. “You stay away from her. It’s bad enough that Hank’s fallen into her snares.” Jim put his arm over her comfortingly, but she flung it off. She didn’t want to be touched. “From now on come around on this side, where I am, when you want me,” she said.

“Okay, okay,” he said.

In a minute Patsy felt guilty and took his hand, but his hand was all she wanted. She lay awake a long time, feeling burned by Hank’s treachery. She decided that he had deliberately let her make a fool of herself, and she determined not to go to the drugstore any more. She would be very cool to him if she ran into him and very matronly—even though she was only potentially a matron.

So, to get out of the house without going near the drugstore, she bundled in her Creature and took a taxi to the zoo. It was a gray day, the seals in the seal pond were not to be seen, and she felt tired from a day and a night of emotion and decided to ride the zoo train around the zoo. She got a seat near the front, buried herself in her Creature, gave the driver her ticket without looking at him. She peered out dispiritedly from the depths of her coat, wishing she had not been a fool and a coward, and wishing also that she had gone to the drugstore. Hank sometimes had a ten o’clock breakfast there and she might be lucky enough to find him without Clara Clark. She had decided to ignore the fact that he had a mistress and remain warm friends with him, anyhow. She wished he had come to the zoo with her, for it was fairly dismal in the cold train almost alone.

The train started and swung to the right to go between two rows of bird houses, and the driver of the train, whose job it was to deliver thumbnail lectures on the various animals that they passed, began his recitation.

“And on your right yew have the South A-merican ma-
caw
,” he said. “On your left you have the
peregrine
falcon, then the fascinating condor, largest of the vultures . . .”

The drivers always twanged their way through the animal kingdom, but there was something in that particular twang that struck Patsy as familiar and she looked at the driver, who was none other than Peewee Raskin, back on the job he loved best. He wore a faded Levi jacket and a red baseball cap.

“Peewee!” she yelled, popping upright.

Peewee turned in surprise, wondering why a pregnant brunette in an old fur coat was yelling at him, and discovered to his astonishment that it was Patsy. The train was still in motion; they were on the backswing, near the guanacos and llamas, and the sight of her threw him completely off his spiel. He waved and she waved and Peewee let the train run off the sidewalk. He tried to recover himself, but the thought that the girl who had read so many strange books was listening to him gave him an awful case of stage fright; he could scarcely remember the animals’ names, much less the particulars of their origins and habits. His pronunciation grew increasingly unconfident, but fortunately none of the few freezing passengers particularly cared. When the train stopped, Patsy ran up and kissed him on the cheek, to his deep embarrassment and the amazement of the few spectators—three Mexicans and a skinny mechanic and his wife and kids. Nice surprises, such as finding Peewee, filled Patsy with delight, and she hopped from one cold foot to the other beaming at him. Except for the baseball cap he seemed completely unchanged.

“My goodness, I never knew I’d be so glad to see you,” she said. “How long have you been here? Why didn’t you call us?”

Peewee shuffled about awkwardly, hardly knowing whether to look at her or not look at her. He had never imagined anyone would be so glad to see him—least of all Patsy.

“Never been here but a month,” he said.

“Why are you limping?” she asked.

“Been gimpy. Got a broken ankle in Flagstaff.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve chosen a safer occupation. You’ve got to come to dinner tonight.”

Peewee turned sideways and expertly blew his nose with his fingers, something that had always horrified her, but which he did as naturally and almost as neatly as if he had had a handkerchief. He had a moment of apprehension about the dinner, for he had no better clothes than what he had on, and had visions of being embarrassed in some splendid restaurant; but Patsy reassured him and soon he left with another huddled trainload of animal lovers, a happier man. Patsy went into the small-animal house and watched the delicate little fennec fox pace back and forth in its cage. Peewee had said he meant to go back to rodeoing when the rodeo arrived in Houston in two months, and it occurred to her how strange it would be if all the people they had known during the summer suddenly came back into their lives. She called a taxi and directed it to the drugstore, convinced that her luck had changed.

To her surprise, it had. Hank was there eating a bowl of chili. His brown suede sports coat seemed to be his only jacket.

“I saved you a seat,” he said when she walked in. She had pretended not to see him. She was quite disconcerted. She felt alternately bold and shy and covered both feelings by launching into an account of her miraculous rediscovery of Peewee, in the midst of which it struck her suddenly that it was presumptuous of him to mention that he had saved her a seat. She felt irritated with him and dropped Peewee.

“I doubt your girl friend wants you saving seats for other women,” she said.

Hank looked surprised. “Nobody cares who I eat with,” he said, ignoring Eddie Lou, who had just glared at them from the grill. The fact that Patsy had come to meet him in a fur coat seemed to her a clear indication of immorality. The few times she came in with her own husband she was usually in jeans and sneakers.

Patsy felt immediately rebuffed. She had had no right to say it, and after all, she had a husband and was on the verge of having a child. She was the one who was doing something inappropriate, and for a moment she felt hopeless, blocked in every direction. But Hank smiled a little apologetically, as if he understood what she was feeling, and it kept the depression from closing in around her. The warmth of the drugstore brought the color back to her cold face. They ate their lunch companionably, both silent and thoughtful.

“Walk to Rice with me,” he suggested. “If a blizzard hits we can both take shelter in your coat.”

“Okay,” Patsy said at once, delighted. They went out into the cold wind and began to walk, as silent as they had been while eating. Both of them recognized that, in a way, they were flirting, and neither was quite confident about it. Patsy looked up at him from time to time. She liked the way his hair never stayed combed. The image of Clara Clark rose up and plagued her again, and she grew moody. He and Clara were scholarly colleagues, after all—they probably had all manner of things to talk about. He would scarcely talk to her at all, and it made her feel dumb and unserious, pretty but purposeless, only a bit of fluff.