Moving On (60 page)

Almost every afternoon she took Davey for a walk in his carriage—usually to the Hortons’—and often as not she came back feeling sexy. It annoyed her and she attributed it partly to her idle daydreams of Hank and partly to the heat, the still, heavy, moist heat of Houston. Everything grew so, in the heat. If it rained in the afternoon the spiky St. Augustine grass was up three inches overnight, or so it seemed. The foliage in the Whitneys’ back yard was always sprouting and spreading, green and shining with rain, the beautiful ferns growing so fast that the gardener could scarcely keep them properly thinned. Houston in June was almost too fertile, too fecund; the Horn of Plenty was spilling over and Patsy decided it must be affecting her subliminally. Something was. At night, when some embrace on the late show reminded her that in the real world, as on the TV screen, humans did actually kiss and hold each other and make love she felt humiliated and small, for she was a woman, she had had a baby, she was ready to give such plenty as she had, and yet no man was there to touch her. She thought of the movie stars and what she had read of them and it puzzled her that it should be so easy for them to move from love to love and bed to bed and yet remain handsome and lovely and gay. It made her feel all the smaller. Not only could she not move from man to man, she could not really hold or please the man she had, and she had not been generous enough to accommodate the only other man who had really wanted her. The day before her period she felt swollen and irritable and gave Davey a slap because he wouldn’t lie still while being diapered. She got tired to death of Frazer that same afternoon and flipped crossly through a paperback by Peg Bracken, wishing someone would call, or that Juanita would come back, or that something would happen to make either the spirit or the flesh work out better for her.

Lacking either consolation, she turned as usual to her friends the Hortons. Almost every evening, when it was cool enough to go out, she sprayed her arms and calves and ankles with mosquito spray and put Davey in his carriage and pushed him up Mandell Street to the Hortons’ garage on West Main. The area beyond the freeway had once been a solid middle-class neighborhood full of two-story brick houses; but lacking the protection of even minimal zoning, it had gradually become pocked with apartment houses, most of them peopled by the young and the divorced. As Patsy walked along she was ogled by shirtless young men drinking beer on their balconies.

The Hortons were having a grim summer, in their way. They were too broke to leave town, and Flap was studying himself red-eyed for his preliminary exams, which came in the early fall. The boys were big enough to bash each other and have it really hurt, and they frequently did. They only had two air conditioners for four rooms, which kept them huddled together more than they liked to be. The kitchen wasn’t air-conditioned, so Emma didn’t cook except when absolutely forced to. She spent most of her time mediating elaborate arguments between the boys, or else protecting one or another boy from Flap, who had grown intolerant of being interrupted while studying. The boys invariably did interrupt him and he sometimes swatted them more heavy-handedly than Emma thought good, so they themselves were frequently in fights.

“Fire or ice,” Patsy said, comparing their overcrowdedness with her loneliness, and they all sat around and drank beer for an hour or so every evening, talking about how in despair they were and in the meanwhile laughing uproariously at their own wit or the antics of their children. Teddy and Tommy were both reasonably respectful of Davey’s fragility, and Tommy, who considered himself infinitely more responsible than his brother, was good at planting himself in front of the baby carriage to be stared at by Davey, who loved to stare at human beings closer to his own size. Teddy thought Davey a bore and once threw a ball up in the air in such a way that it came down—by sheer accident, he claimed—in the baby carriage. It was only a rubber ball, but Emma scolded him fiercely. Davey had not been hit and Patsy kept calm. Teddy took his reprimand casually, humming to himself while it was in progress.

One evening ten days after Jim had left, the Hortons walked over to her place. The Whitneys were gone and they all sat out in the big back yard while it grew dark. The boys had orange Popsicles, provided by Patsy. Davey lay on a blanket between his mother and Emma, wiggling on his stomach. “A few months and he’ll be mo-bile,” Emma said.

Patsy wore jeans and an old blue blouse. She had washed her hair that afternoon and felt clean and in good spirits. Flap lay on his back on the grass with a copy of
Ramparts
spread over his face. Occasionally Teddy sat on his chest for a few minutes while he picked particles of grass off his Popsicle. Flap pretended to be asleep but he was actually putting into effect a plan he had to see Patsy’s breasts, or at least one of them. If she thought he was asleep she might decide to nurse Davey and he could peer out from under the
Ramparts
and watch. He had always wanted to see Patsy’s breasts, and that was the only plan he could devise that offered any hope of success.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. It was not feeding time and in any case Patsy was not about to uncover herself around such a transparent lecher as Flap. When it grew dark they all went inside.

Patsy left Davey on his blanket and went to the kitchen to make lemonade. When she carried in the drinks, Emma had gone to the john, Flap was lying on his stomach on the floor reading an old book catalogue, and Tommy and Teddy were sitting politely on the couch awaiting their lemonade. Flap reached up for his beer and the boys took their glasses carefully and sipped sly sips. It wasn’t until she was lowering herself to the floor that Patsy noticed a drastic change in the company. Davey wasn’t on his blanket.

“Where’s Davey?” she asked, her heart pounding. She looked around the open floor but didn’t see him. In the moment of quiet they all heard the toilet flush. Patsy hurried to the baby bed, thinking she had absent-mindedly put him back in it, or that perhaps Emma had, but he was not there either. Her legs felt shaky. “Did Emma take him?” she asked.

“To the john?” Flap asked. He looked up, puzzled, just as Emma walked in.

“Davey’s gone,” Patsy said. “Where could he have gone? I was only out of the room for a minute.”

“He couldn’t be gone,” Emma said. Then she and Flap both looked at their sons. Teddy was sipping lemonade, a picture of angelic innocence, but Tommy was red in the face from the effort it took to repress his laughter.

“Aha,” Flap said.

“He’s under the baby bed,” Tommy said. “Teddy rolled him while you were reading.” He began to giggle. Teddy pretended not to hear, but a sly grin touched his lips. Patsy rushed to the bed and sure enough Davey was there, on his back, and quite pleased about it. He was trying to reach the bedsprings. He only began to fret when Patsy swooped him out and held him. Her arms and legs were trembling from the scare she’d had, and she was afraid to look at Teddy for fear she’d go yank him off the couch and spank him. But Emma did just that, and in a minute he was properly spanked and was crying loudly, almost in tune with Davey, who started crying as soon as Teddy did. The Hortons quickly gathered themselves up and left, Tommy pleading to be allowed to finish his lemonade. Patsy cried a bit from relief and tension and tried to get them to stay. She felt silly for getting upset over nothing, but they were all embarrassed and glad to be out of one another’s company for a time. Patsy made an awkward attempt to make friends again with Teddy, but he would have none of it.

“She’s really uptight,” Flap said as they walked home. Teddy was riding on his hip, totally exhausted.

“You can’t blame her,” Emma said. “Jim was a fool to go off and leave her with that baby, I don’t care how temporary the job is. If one of mine had disappeared I’d have acted the same way. Fortunately you were always around trying to screw me when things like that happened and I never had a chance to get nervous.”

“You think if I went back and tried to screw her it would help?” Flap asked, trying to be jocular. It came out wrong and he instantly regretted having said it. Emma was huffy the rest of the evening.

Patsy kept crying and wiping her eyes long after they were gone, although she knew it was silly. Davey was already blissfully asleep, not a bit the worse for having been rolled. But the sense of panic she had felt when she couldn’t locate him wouldn’t quite leave her. Several times she went over and looked, to be sure he was in the baby bed. It was absurd, but she was terrified. She checked all the windows and doors to be sure no one could creep in and steal him. A bath failed to calm her and she was in bed trying to go to sleep when the phone rang.

“My goodness, you’re in bed early,” Jim said.

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “Please come home. I’m no good alone.”

She told him about the incident and tried to explain why he had to come home and help her, but everything she said sounded silly and Jim was not at all sympathetic.

“But that’s so minor,” he said. “It’s bound to happen to every mother. You wouldn’t have been any less scared if I had been there.”

“Yes, I would,” she said and began to cry. It embarrassed her and annoyed him. He was silent until she stopped.

“That’s about three bucks’ worth of tears,” he said.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I can’t. I’m lonely. I never said I was the independent type. I just don’t know what to do with myself.”

“Come on, now,” he said. “That’s silly. Take a painting class or something. It’s absurd for me to come home and do nothing when I’m making seven hundred dollars a week. Juanita will be there. It doesn’t make sense for me to quit. We can’t just act from whimsey.”

Patsy felt choked. She didn’t know what to say. He was absolutely right—it was all minor. But everything he said felt wrong.

“Don’t you love me?” she asked, hating herself for fishing.

“Sure,” he said. “Of course I do. But that has nothing to do with it.” And he went on to tell her about his work. It was fun and he sounded in fine fettle. Boots and Pete were coming in a week. Pete was going to be in a clown sequence.

Patsy calmed down a little, listening. She was hoping he would ask her to come up. She waited, trying to chatter naturally, but Jim hung up without inviting her, or even hinting at it. When she hung up her receiver she felt dry of tears, so flat with loneliness and disappointment that she didn’t know what to do. She lay blankly until sleep came. And when she awoke she felt just as blank and flat. It was one of the few mornings in her life that seemed utterly not worth getting up for, though it was bright and sunny in the room. She started to call Jim and ask if they could come, but she looked at the phone awhile and didn’t. He would be on the set, anyway. She looked straight up at the ceiling and listened to Davey wail for her for a full ten minutes before she found the spirit to get up and change him and take him to the rocking chair to give him the breast.

2

H
ER STATE OF SPIRITLESSNESS
lasted all that day. She didn’t go out until the evening, and then instead of wheeling Davey to the Hortons’, she wheeled him to Rice. In the empty quadrangle there was a rabbit nibbling at one of the hedges. Patsy tried to point him out to Davey but had no luck. Except for a graduate student or two strolling along with their girls, the campus was empty. The twilight and the heavy silent buildings soothed her a little.

Jim didn’t call that night and the next morning she awoke feeling agitated. She toyed with the idea of calling him, but Juanita came in while she was brooding and her spirits shot up. She flung off her robe and got dressed, thinking it would be a great day for random shopping. She called Emma, but Emma had just burned her hand on some grease and didn’t want to go.

She went downtown alone and spent sixty dollars on two dresses for herself and some baby clothes for Davey. She watched half of
Youngblood Hawke
because she happened to be passing the theater and felt like seeing a movie. When she came out of the chill darkness the heat off the baking pavement was so great it almost made her faint. She made it to the Ford and drove to her drugstore for a milkshake and a grilled cheese sandwich before going home. Reading seemed feasible again, so she idled at the paperback rack while her sandwich was grilling. A fat historical romance called
Angelique
, with a stunning blonde on the cover, tempted her—a silly romance might get her through the evening. Then she noticed an unobtrusive paperback called
The Marriage Art
and on impulse took it to the counter with her. It proved to be mostly about sex and she turned through it as she ate, slightly repelled and yet slightly fascinated. There was a chapter on what the author considered more or less advanced variations; the one at which she paused the longest was a technique which required the female to place an icebag at the base of her partner’s scrotum a moment or two prior to orgasm. It was, the author advised, not for amateurs. Patsy sipped her milkshake thoughtfully, trying to imagine herself lying down to make love equipped with an icebag. It did not seem likely she would ever be that advanced about it all.

As she was brooding about
The Marriage Art
an arm brushed her shoulder and she looked up into the face of William Duffin. He had quietly taken the seat beside her and was smiling and reading about the icebag variation, across her bosom almost.

“Hi,” he said. “Just browsing, or do you go in for that sort of thing?”

Patsy blushed and closed the book. She was very embarrassed. Later it occurred to her that at that moment she felt very much the way Peewee must have felt when she caught him reading
Sexus
.

“Why did you have to sit down there?” she said irritably. She wanted to move over two or three seats but didn’t.

“You’re blushing,” he said. “My goodness. It looks like a fascinating book. Loan it to me when you finish it. A double cheeseburger please, and coffee.” He was in tennis clothes and his long angular face was sweaty.