Moving On (45 page)

Lee sighed and gave her a long look. “You could be my oldest daughter,” she said. “She knows a bit about her father and me and she asks the same thing. I was going to show you some pictures, wasn’t I?” To Patsy’s astonishment she went off to the bedroom and came back with some color snapshots of the three girls, all of whom were tall like their father and thin like Lee. All were pretty, with long dark hair.

Lee sat down and rubbed her eyelids with her forefingers, as if she were very tired.

“Do leave him,” Patsy said. “It’s your only hope.”

Lee snorted. “Don’t go presuming to tell me what my only hope is,” she said. “For all you know, your husband might be my only hope.”

“But why stay?”

“Because I’m scared to leave. Twenty-one years is a long time. I’d never really get free, and besides it’s just scary, unless you have a bird in the bush. I don’t know what kind of bird I could find at my age. We don’t have any dough, either. We live well and Bill buys lots of books, but the girls cost a lot to educate and we never have any ready money. I’d have to go to work and I don’t want to. I worked for years and I want leisure now, even if just to be bored.

“I don’t have enough guts to leave,” she added. “I only have guts enough to play around now and then, when I can find someone young and nice.”

Patsy stood up. She had been about to get calm, but at the thought of Jim and Lee her agitation returned and she wanted very badly to be away. “You better leave us alone,” she said. “I’d have to be put in a cage before I’d come in this house again.” And to her great annoyance she began to cry. She wanted very badly to be strong and stony, but instead she cried.

Lee got her some Kleenex. “You’re a little like Melissa,” she said. “She’s our oldest. It’s too bad you couldn’t have met them. You might like me better if you had. At least I’m a good mom, I think.”

Patsy whirled around, very distressed. Everything was so confusing. The girls had looked intelligent and happy in their pictures, and the woman who had raised them stood before her talking of seducing Jim. She moved toward the door, still crying.

“I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I really didn’t set out to spoil your afternoon.” Patsy turned to look at her, too confused to answer.

“Sometimes I hate this fucking life,” Lee said sadly. Patsy stood with her back to the door, tears dripping off her cheeks. “Come on, honey. Wipe your face. It’s not so bad.”

“It is bad!” Patsy said, bursting out. “I’d run away to China before I’d get involved in anything like that.”

Lee sighed. “It was a mistake for me to say those things to you,” she said. “I know too much more than you know for us to be really able to talk.”

“I don’t like that!” Patsy said, feeling suddenly vengeful and hateful. “You didn’t say anything so smart. All you did was point out what a crud your husband is. I started out feeling sorry for you but I don’t feel sorry for you any more.”

“I should hope you don’t,” Lee said hotly. “Never feel sorry for a woman—we bloody well get what we deserve. By the same token I won’t need to feel sorry for you when your husband comes dawdling around.”

“He never will!” Patsy said furiously. “He’ll never sleep with you. Why would he?” And she drew herself up in anger.

The moment she found her dignity and hit back, all Lee’s dignity left her. She stood looking at the floor, not answering Patsy’s question. She compressed her lips very tightly for a second, as if to hold in all words, all emotions, all hurts, and then to Patsy’s consternation she began to settle to the floor weeping. She didn’t fall, but she let herself fold downward until she was sitting hunched over on the hard floor sobbing and squeezing her hands into fists. Patsy was stunned. She didn’t know what to do. Lee kept bending over until her forehead almost touched the floor, sobbing loudly. Then suddenly she looked up, choking but trying to talk. “Go away, you bitch,” she said. “Why did you want to hurt me this way? What am I that everybody wants to hurt me . . . always wants to hurt me.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Patsy said, her anger gone. She could hardly believe that the woman who had been so proud and so possessed a few minutes before had suddenly become the abject woman on the floor. “Please get up,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t hurt me,” Lee said, sniffing and calming a bit. “You couldn’t hurt me. I hurt myself. You’re not smart enough to hurt me. Just get out of here and stay away from my husband.”

Suddenly she got up, strode past Patsy out the door, and stood on her front porch wiping her face with her hands and looking far up into a big elm tree that stood in the yard.

Patsy decided there was nothing to do but leave. She went timidly past Lee, down the steps.

“I’m sorry again,” Lee said. “I’m the one to blame, but you needn’t come back here any more. I don’t know why you’d want to. I hope you manage to keep your principles polished. With a face like yours it’s going to take a lot of polish.”

“You either cry or you say awful things to me,” Patsy said.

“No, I’m going to rake some leaves. I only have fits once or twice a year, and you’re not enough of a threat to make me have a real fit.”

She gave Patsy one flat glance and then turned and walked up her driveway. Patsy walked home and lay on her bed for three hours, waves of agitation sweeping through her. They didn’t completely subside for two days. Lee had somehow had the last word. Dozens of comebacks occurred to her as she lay on her bed, and it irked her terribly that she would never get to make them.

The whole encounter left her feeling weak and it was a real task to drag herself to the store and get groceries for Peewee’s dinner. She did it, and made spaghetti, but her mind was on the afternoon. Peewee arrived, shiningly clean in Levi’s, every hair slicked down, terribly awed even to be coming into the garage apartment of such a big house.

Jim was delighted to see him, and Patsy let them do all the talking. She listened only with the shallow part of her mind—the deeper part was arguing fiercely with Lee Duffin. It was almost midnight—and Jim had gone to take Peewee home—before her mind began to leave the afternoon. She sat at her dressing table combing her hair for a long time. While she was combing it she remembered Hank, and the moment on the corner when she had thought he was going to kiss her. It was a better thing to think about than the argument with Lee. Lee was a sad, disappointed woman. The things she said had not really been important. The moment on the corner was a little frightening, but it had been important.

When Jim came back she was in bed reading Frazer, and instead of looking restless and irritable, as she had all evening, she looked subdued and glowing. Jim sat down and kissed her, and she allowed him a light kiss before she moved her head. “Stop, please,” she said. “I’m reading. I can’t be interrupted until the end of the chapter.

“Fourteen pages,” she added, checking.

“You ought to see the dump Peewee lives in,” Jim said. “He’ll be lucky if he stays alive in that neighborhood.”

“I wish I had been nicer. I wasn’t myself this evening.”

Jim went to the closet and dragged out the box his rodeo pictures were in. He sat down and went through it, pulling out a file here and a file there. Patsy let Frazer fall onto her bosom. “I doubt he’s ever known a nice girl,” she said, thinking of Peewee and the life of squalor he must lead. She could not imagine Peewee having any girl, and it made her sad. Her nice bed, nice apartment, nice husband made her feel cozy suddenly. She felt she had been wrong to be contemptuous of Lee Duffin for being afraid to leave a nice house with a beautiful blue rug.

“These are pretty good,” Jim said. “I might have got the book published if I’d kept on with it.”

“You can blame that on me,” Patsy said. “I couldn’t take any more cowboys.”

“Maybe I’ll go take some more next summer and leave you here to bring up Junior.”

“Wait till you see Junior. You might not want to leave us.”

“Bill said I should write my thesis next summer.”

“When did you start calling him Bill?”

“He keeps insisting.”

“I had a chat with her this afternoon,” she said. “You’ll never guess what they have planned for us.”

“Well, we’re supposed to go to dinner with them some night next week.”

“No,” Patsy said. “What they really have in mind is her seducing you and him seducing me, in that order. Not that they have all that much interest in us, of course. It’s just that their sex life withers and they need a gay young couple for fertilizer once in a while.”

“Are you crazy?” he asked, looking around.

“No,” Patsy said. “She told me that in so many words this afternoon.”

“Oh, well, don’t pay much attention to it,” Jim said. “She’s nice but she’s not very stable. Bill told me she’s had two nervous breakdowns. He’s had a lot of trouble with her.”

“That’s lovely,” Patsy said. She sat up, very annoyed. “Now he’s telling you his marital troubles. Next you’ll be telling him yours. His wife tells me hers and probably expects me to tell her mine. Pretty soon we’ll know all about one another, and the cozy little switch can take place. Me-him, you-her, just like she said.”

Jim shut the picture file and yawned. He didn’t take any of it seriously. “Don’t get carried away with your own rhetoric,” he said. “Lee’s obviously a little neurotic, that’s all. We don’t have any marital problems to tell them about, anyway. They’d get bored with us.”

“Like fun they would. Maybe after a few months of swapsy-wapsy they’d get bored with us. It’s very condescending of you to call someone you scarcely know neurotic. I think that’s very sloppy.”

“What would you call her?” He sat down on the bed and kicked off his loafers, a habit he knew annoyed her and yet couldn’t break. He remembered that it annoyed her just as one of his shoes narrowly missed a vase full of ferns.

“There you go again,” she said.

“Sorry.” His good humor was undisturbed.

“Miserable is what I’d call Lee Duffin. Miserable and neglected, just like I’ll probably be at her age.”

Jim chuckled infuriatingly, all masculine poise. He was in no mood to take female irrationality very seriously.

“Don’t chuckle like that,” she said. “I’ll hit you.”

“He says she’s very demanding,” he said. His head disappeared for a moment as he took off his pullover.

“Sure. She probably has to demand like hell to get one drop of affection out of him.”

“You’ve got a block where he’s concerned.”

“I sure have.” She got out of bed and stamped angrily off to the bathroom. Her belly was large enough to eclipse the toilet bowl. When she came back Jim was straining his eyes to read a footnote in the back of Robinson’s
Chaucer
. The light was completely wrong and he had not bothered to change it.

“For god’s sake,” she said, exasperated. “How did you ever expect to be a photographer if you don’t have any sense of where the light is?”

He looked up, a little abstracted, then put the book down and reached for her. “Don’t grab,” she said, but he did anyway and after a short tussle got her turned on her back. “We don’t have any marital problems, do we?” he asked.

“I don’t like to wrestle when I’m pregnant,” she said, staring up at him. She was friendly but grim in her determination not to yield points unnecessarily.

“We don’t, do we?” he insisted.

“We will if you insist on attaching yourself to that guy’s fetlocks,” she said. “I don’t like him.”

“Okay,” he said. “But do me a favor and go to this one dinner. I promised, and one dinner is no more than your wifely duty.”

He tried to kiss her but she squirmed and looked cheerfully at the ceiling. “Okay, one dinner,” she said. “Never let it be said that I’m slacking my wifely duties.”

“I sort of wish he’d quit pestering me about the massage parlors,” Jim said.

“What?” she asked, relaxing.

“The massage parlors. You know, the ones that are really whorehouses—there was a story about them in the paper. You go in for a massage and get a girl. Bill’s always pestering me to take him to one. He thinks it’s a novel way to work a whorehouse.”

“He’s a monster,” Patsy said. “He’s married, and he goes to whorehouses?”

Jim sighed. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Millions of men who are married go to whorehouses, apparently. It’s not like he was the only roving husband in the world.”

“After twenty-one years, he treats her that way? I never heard of anything so awful.”

“That’s a long time to be married,” he said quietly.

“So what? Momma and Daddy have been married over thirty years and Daddy doesn’t go off to massage parlors.”

“No, he just drinks and wastes money and lets his youngest daughter screw herself up in California.”

“How do you know she’s screwed up? Besides, that’s evading the question. How many years before you become eligible for that kind of relief?”

“Oh, nag, nag, nag,” he said. “If you didn’t talk so much you wouldn’t get ideas like that.”

“Don’t evade the question.” She watched him closely.

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “It seems to me I’ve been eternally faithful to you already and probably I’ll go on through several more eternities. Just don’t yap at me about it. How do I know what we’ll be doing in twenty years. The one thing I’m sure of is that you’ll still be yapping.”

“If you were a man of principle, you’d know now,” Patsy said. But she lost heart for the argument, light as it was. Lee Duffin came back to mind, crouched on her living-room floor weeping and raising and lowering her torso hopelessly. When she tried to imagine the scenes that lay behind that weeping her mind was blank. The thought of Bill Duffin simply made her feel cold. She drew Jim close to her and held his hand long after he was asleep.

The next day’s mail brought a letter on the stationery of the William Duffins:

Dear Mrs. Carpenter,

I’m very sorry indeed for my performance today. It was entirely my fault. I’m so ashamed of it that it’s all I can do to write you this note. My only excuse is that I’m in trouble. It would be painful for us to meet right now, of course, but I hope you’ll forgive me and not find it necessary to shun me entirely. I shan’t ever be that way again.