Moving On (71 page)

“I don’t see why you asked us here,” Patsy said. “Was it just so you could humiliate me in front of your Hollywood friends?”

“It was nothing of the sort, and you know it. Besides, I didn’t humiliate you in front of my Hollywood friends. I didn’t humiliate you in front of anybody.”

“You did it in your usual strange way,” she said. “No blame can possibly fall on you, don’t worry. You’re too smart to do anything I could feel good about blaming you for. You aren’t that generous. You humiliated me by not doing anything with me at all in front of your friends. Am I such a leper that you don’t want to be seen with me suddenly? You acted like you’d rather no one knew I was your wife—that’s what’s making me cry.”

“Your vanity is making you cry,” he said. “I guess you wanted me to arrange an occasion for you, so you could show off for the director and the producer and other big shots.”

“I did not,” she said. “You didn’t even want to introduce me to those people in the swimming pool when we were coming back. They didn’t look like big shots.”

“I didn’t know any of those people very well,” he said, growing more disgusted. “They don’t really care to meet anybody I know, or if they do it’s just so they can try and screw you. They’re a very hang-loose bunch.”

“Even so, that doesn’t make me a leper,” Patsy said, reaching for the towel that she had been using to wipe her eyes. “You’re looking at me as if I was a leper right now.”

“I didn’t know you’d been saving up tears for six weeks” he said. “If I’d known that, maybe I wouldn’t have asked you.”

Patsy lay down on the bed and put her face in the crook of her arm and said no more. It had been a dismal evening from the outset and it had become obvious that nothing was going to improve it. Dixie and Joe Percy and Sonny and Eleanor had all gone to dinner together, and Patsy had at first assumed that she and Jim would go along. She had a really fetching, wild summer dress that she intended to wear; but to her surprise Jim insisted that they eat alone. It was very unusual, for they usually got along better in crowds than they did alone. Still, it didn’t bother her unduly. It struck her that perhaps she had misjudged him; perhaps he had really missed her and wanted her all to himself. That was a pleasant thought. She wore the dress, anyway.

The first unpleasantness had to do with the baby-sitter, who was fat, fortyish, had an enormous stiff bouffant hairdo, talked strangely, and handed them a pamphlet on Rosicrucianism only minutes after she had come in the door. “I tell you, it will open your eyes,” she said. Davey was wailing. He knew he was in a strange place and had a notion his mother was about to leave him with a stranger, and he didn’t like it. No more did his mother. The few times she had left him at night she had had Juanita; she had never gone off and left him wailing with a stranger who seemed to be a Rosicrucian. The sound of his wails affected her. They didn’t sound like normal wails but like appeals for help, and her legs were trembling as she walked down the motel sidewalk. She had to fight down the urge to ask Jim to abandon the whole idea of dining out; but it was against her self-evolved principles of child raising to coddle her son or let herself become a slave to the sound of his voice, so she set her teeth and tried to keep from trembling and went on and got in the huge rental car Jim had. Jim himself was not overly affected by Davey’s crying and had merely been amused by the baby-sitter. Patsy didn’t like it one bit. If she could have had her wish at that moment she would have run the day backward like a home movie—would have gone back up the sidewalk, put things back in suitcases, gone back to the airport, back into the sky, back to Houston and South Boulevard. Then she could have put Davey into his own bed, where he was peaceful and happy.

But since that was impossible, she tried to make the best of things, for Jim’s sake. Amarillo was an obstacle in itself, stark, sandy, and untreed. She felt exposed, and they were both nervous, though on the surface Jim seemed in a pleasant mood. They went to a steak house, which he said was the best he had found, and it was awful. Patsy had no appetite anyway. Davey’s wails kept reverberating through her mind, and her stomach felt closed. Even so, it was a miserable restaurant. The bite or two of meat she forced down tasted like wood, the salad tasted like plastic, and even the bread was bad. Jim told anecdotes about the filming and the doings of the movie people, but somehow nothing he said got through to her. It was the sort of talk he would make with his parents if they visited; it didn’t seem personally intended. She began to feel a groundless, unjustifiable irritation with him. It seemed to her that he had probably only chosen the steak house because it wasn’t the one where Eleanor and Sonny and Dixie and Joe were eating—
that
was probably the good one. It seemed too that he had not insisted on dining alone because he had any desire to be alone with her but because he didn’t want his friends to see him with her. It was an eerie feeling, one she had never had before with Jim, but it persisted. He glanced around from time to time, almost as if he were afraid someone would see them.

When they got back to the motel, ten or twelve young couples were sitting by the swimming pool drinking and cutting up. All the girls were in bikinis. One young man yelled at Jim, and Patsy’s spirits lifted a little. She had a bikini, and she had not been to a party in a long time. It would be fun to sit around talking to Hollywooders. The young men seemed loose and attractive and she was all for running up and donning her suit. It was the kind of scene she had imagined more than a year before, in Phoenix, after she had seen
Lolita
. But to her surprise Jim seemed discomfited when the young man asked them to join the fun. He introduced Patsy around, but a little perfunctorily, and before she could really strike up a conversation with anybody he made the surprising remark that they needed to get back to Davey, and led her away. She felt again that somehow he was embarrassed by her, though certainly no one in the group had seemed to find her odd. She looked back at them wistfully across the sidewalk. The wavering pool light made the scene all the more attractive. Inside, they found Davey asleep and the baby-sitter reading one of her pamphlets. Patsy suggested they keep the sitter and go swim, but Jim said he was tired and had the sitter out the door before Patsy could argue. It was only ten o’clock and Davey was down for the night, and they had absolutely nothing to do except sit and stare at each other. When Jim switched on the big television set and began to watch the news Patsy went to the bathroom to take off her pretty dress and a feeling of lonely wretchedness came over her. She wanted to be in Houston, watching television with Hank. She began to cry, the tears burning her cheeks.

Jim tried to affect surprise when she came out of the bathroom crying, but he was not surprised, and he didn’t blame her. He knew it had not been the sort of evening she had been expecting. For some reason he had not wanted it to be the sort of evening she had been expecting. He had not known until she arrived how nervous he was about her, or how threatened she made him feel. What she said about him not wanting her to meet his friends was quite true, and it had been as big a surprise to him as it was to her. Normally, he wouldn’t have cared, but the moment she had arrived at the motel, looking beautiful and radiant and fresh, something stiffened in him. The little world of the movie set was the first world he had ever found on his own, the first place where he had felt like a professional among professionals. It was very different from graduate school, which was only an extension of worlds he had known. Despite himself, when Patsy arrived that day he felt she had come to rob him of what he had found. He simply didn’t want to usher her into the company that had been his—she would immediately make it hers. Eleanor and Sonny and Joe were as surprised as Patsy that she was not coming to dinner with them; they had all, in their various ways, been looking forward to seeing her. Only Dixie was not surprised, and when somebody mentioned it she dismissed it as obvious. “I don’t blame him,” she said. “I’d hide her too if I was him. She always shows him up.”

When the company had called them to the swimming pool Jim had felt the same awkward desire—to get Patsy away. Everyone would like her and she would like everyone, and the whole future he had been arranging might be altered. She might decide to stay for days; might even decide to come to California with him. He could not control his uneasiness, but he did feel ashamed later, once he recognized his own motives. When she had cried herself out and lay face down on the bed he felt even more ashamed. Her bare feet were sticking off the bed. He looked at her feet, at her ankles and legs, and the knot of anxiety inside him began to loosen. With her head hidden and only her calves and feet showing, she seemed very different—helpless, touching, hurt. He began to regret the whole evening. He had been a fool. She had been very beautiful in her wild black and white dress, and if only he had not been silly it could have been a wonderful evening. Patsy would not really have been likely to disturb anything. She was, after all, his wife. He did love her.

The future he had been arranging was unreal, anyway, and a little scary. The thought of visiting Eleanor on her ranch was a little scary. He had no idea what would happen or what Sonny might think. Los Angeles was a vague, strange prospect. Patsy was familiar and dear. Her legs were very nice, and they were there, not in the nebulous future. He remembered the trouble about the whore—he had not made love in months. He got up and went to the bed. “Turn over,” he said. “I’m sorry and you’re right about everything. I guess I was just competing with you again, or didn’t want you competing with me, or something. I was awful. I’m very sorry. Tomorrow night we’ll have the night we should have had tonight.”

He put his hand on the back of her neck and she stiffened slightly. His hand did not feel like it belonged there, and what he had said made her feel no less hopeles, no less distant and cut off, and no less bruised. “It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t mean to seem so demanding.” But she only said it hoping he would stop talking. His apologies just made it worse. They made her feel slightly contemptuous of him.

“I guess I should have admitted long ago that I felt in competition with you,” he said. “I kept not admitting it to myself. Maybe I’ve just begun to grow up this summer.”

“I hate conversations like this,” Patsy said. “Please don’t apologize any more.”

Jim was a little annoyed but kept rubbing her neck. He felt genuinely sorry and genuinely loving toward her and it seemed to him that she never gave him credit for his genuine feelings. She was always ready to blame him when his good feelings got covered over, but she was almost never ready to love him when he felt loving toward her.

“I was just trying to tell you I was sorry I treated you that way,” he said.

Patsy sighed, wishing he would take her advice for once. “All evening I felt like you didn’t like me,” she said. “I felt like I was offensive to you. You used to make me feel like you were proud of me but tonight you just made me feel like you were sort of ashamed to be seen with me. I’m sure I was wrong to feel that way but there’s no point in your trying to explain it away. It doesn’t make me un-feel it.”

“But I was silly. I love you. I love you very much.”

She sighed again, wishing she could simply go to sleep and be unconscious of all that was happening. “Maybe I’d rather you just liked me,” she said. “Maybe I’m too simple-minded to appreciate love if it’s so changeable and inconsistent. If you just liked me we might have a little more harmony. Ow!” A hair had caught in the stem of his wrist watch.

“I’ve never seen you more beautiful,” he said.

Patsy felt too discouraged even to sigh. “I’m not sure you like Davey, either,” she said. “You haven’t held him much.”

“We’re just new to one another,” he said, impatient with the subject of Davey. His relationship with Davey would take care of itself. “He’d rather you held him, anyway.”

Patsy turned on her side to try and explain. “Sure he would. I’ve held him all his life. I’m familiar to him. If you’d hold him more he’d begin to like you.” The thought of Davey and Jim really liking each other touched her. “I know you do love us,” she said in a different, softer voice. “Please don’t let yourself become unfamiliar to us.”

But Jim had made his apologies and was only thinking of sex. Patsy saw it from his face and the moment of warmth she felt for him got mixed with guilt and dread. Though part of her wanted to be accommodating, she had never found it so hard. She had never felt so awkward in bed or found it more difficult to make a simple move. “You mean you haven’t been sleeping with starlets all this time?” she said, trying to be light, as he was undressing.

“No, nobody,” he said. And it only sank her spirits the more. She knew it was true and it made her feel the more guilty, the more obligated, and the more wretched. Her limbs didn’t want to move. Her panties hung on one heel and it seemed to take an hour to get them off. She felt strange with him and didn’t want him to touch her breasts, but Jim was so starved and impatient that he noticed nothing. It was fortunate. When he was asleep Patsy was surprised to find that she had recovered a bit of warmth for him. She had expected to feel like dying, but she didn’t at all. She felt dutiful, and that was something. Jim was only Jim. It was not impossible. And sex was only sex. It hadn’t counted, hadn’t meant anything, but it was still only sex and it was a relief to find it didn’t involve some kind of instant destruction. She had feared it might, and she got up and sat on the john awhile, depressed, but in such a light, clearheaded way that it was almost pleasant. It meant, she supposed, that she had become worldly at last, and she went in and went to sleep without thinking about it any more.

Perhaps because he was in unfamiliar surroundings, Davey woke early. It was only a little while after dawn. Patsy had not slept very deeply and woke as soon as he did. She fed him and decided to take him for a walk, even though it would mean carrying him. Jim was sound asleep and would be for hours and she didn’t like sitting in closed rooms. She put on some jeans and a sweatshirt—brought in case she decided to make a quick trip to visit Roger—and sat Davey on her hip and went out. The red sun had barely risen above the plain when they left the motel. It was a clear ball, hanging in the gray sky to the east. The streets were quiet and it was cool and Davey was pleased to be out and moving. Cars passed them, cars on Route Sixty-six. Davey looked at them, and the weary occupants of the cars looked back curiously at the young woman in sneakers and jeans, walking her baby at dawn. “You’re getting heavy, old chum,” she said, switching him to her other hip. Davey spat up on her sweatshirt and kept his eyes on the road. There was dew on the grass by the sidewalk.