Moving On (79 page)

Patsy did not cry hard or long—she felt too listless and unenergetic. Her throat and chest felt stuffed, as if she were an unemptied vacuum cleaner. Such a mess and such a cheap mess, common and hopeless and yet puzzling. She could remember vaguely that she had been unhappy at times, a year before, two years before, but in retrospect it seemed such a mild, guiltless, unessential unhappiness that it scarcely deserved the name. It was the kind of unhappiness two aspirin should have cured. Then her dissatisfactions had been normal and natural ones, at least, and not so confusing.

That kind of unhappiness was all past, all past for good, she felt, looking at the young child and the young cat. The cat reached out a paw and tapped one of her hands. She scratched it between the ears and it closed its eyes. Davey was delighted and made sounds. The kitten stretched out on its side on the blue spread, yawned, got ready to go to sleep. Davey would have liked to touch it but didn’t quite dare. Once when he advanced a hand the cat raised its head and looked at him sternly. “Un-uh,” Patsy said. “Let the kitty-cat sleep.”

Evening was closing down. The room was almost dark. Patsy picked up the phone and called Juanita, asked her to get a taxi and please come, she needed to go out. There was to be a graduate students’ party that evening to celebrate the decline of summer and the impending resumption of graduate miseries. She had not meant to go, mostly because she didn’t want to see Hank publicly. She was afraid something might show. She had gone to Amarillo with some slight hope that she and Jim might bind themselves together again, in a way that would exclude Hank, but it hadn’t happened. Her marriage was simply out of control. Jim was spinning off into some new orbit, far from her, and there was no way she could check him. She had come back to Houston with the sense that it was simply all beyond her, finally. She couldn’t reach Jim, and he couldn’t reach her. But Hank could reach her, in at least one way. He wanted her more than ever and the night of her return she was very vulnerable to being wanted. His desire carried her with it; when he touched her she felt all the things she had always hoped to feel. Most of the four days she had been back had been spent in his bed. Life became so physical that she had no time to think, no way to think; the bed was their country and thought only a kind of evening shadow that sometimes stretched across them when they were tired, their skins still smelling of the sun.

But Jim’s phone call made the new country seem unreal. She was back with herself, her marriage, her guilt and loneliness, her child and a cat. Where had she been? What had she been doing? Details of the day’s passion rose to mind, sickening her. Poor Jim had done nothing. He loved her. Why had she berated him so? She was the one who was guilty. She knew she didn’t want to sit there all evening thinking about it, the cat asleep, Davey soon to be asleep. Better to go to the party. Better, perhaps, to see Hank in public while the country seemed so flat and barren to her. Perhaps she would give him up, make Jim come home, try again. Anyway the Hortons would be there. She could get drunk and not have to think about it all night. She had not been drunk in a long time. She put on a green summer dress and was ready to go when Juanita arrived. Even in her gloom it was nice to think how surprised everyone would be to see her, especially Hank. She herself did not ever expect to be pleasantly surprised again. Jim’s little confession might have been her last surprise.

Six hours later everyone was drunk or, at the very least, tipsy and danced-out and sweaty and feeling happy and doomed. All the windows in Kenny’s hot bare-floored second-story apartment had been flung as high as they would go, giving the neighbors an unwelcome earful of rock music. Only the host and his girl—a stocky junior from Harlingen—were left on their feet. Everyone else was sitting on the floor, drinking and watching them dance. Patsy sat between Hank and Emma, and they were all slightly high. She had not really paid Hank much attention and was sure that no one had noticed anything. There was so little to notice that it almost upset her, for it seemed to her that he was much less interesting and much less forceful in a group than he was alone. In a group Hank faded out of sight; Flap had more to say, and even Kenny Cambridge was livelier.

But Patsy was not really bothered; like everyone else she was mostly interested in watching Lee Duffin. Bill was out of town and she had come to the party with her acknowledged boy friend; there had been gossip about them all spring but actually seeing them together was something else. He was a slim young graduate student named Peter, a nice boy with a neat soft blond beard. He danced awkwardly and clearly felt awkward; coming had apparently been Lee’s idea. Lee looked splendid, Patsy thought. She wore a white summer dress and was neither nervous nor abashed. She took good care of Peter, danced with him, kept him drinking until he relaxed, and treated him very tenderly. “He’s so slight,” Patsy said to Emma. It was strangely cheering to have another adulteress in the room.

“I like him, though,” Emma said. “I admit it seems a little too Henry James. But they look nice together. I kind of envy her. Nobody’s ever going to make me into a Madame de Vionnet. Peter’s certainly nicer than her husband.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Patsy said, drinking some more vodka punch. It had a nice limey taste. Lee looked pensively into her glass and then smiled at Peter. It occurred to Patsy that she was playing the role with Peter that Eleanor Guthrie had played with her husband; she might be playing it with him at that moment, at some distant rodeo, while Sonny rode a bull. The world seemed very confusing. It bothered her that Hank was not impressive in a crowd. He never had anything to say. He was good-looking in his way, but she didn’t care about that. She wanted him not to be so dull. Then he slyly hooked one of his fingers through one of hers and she forgot that she was worried. Lightness filled her head and she felt happy. The touch reminded her of other touches. Kenny was fondling his sloppy girl friend, who seemed neither pleased nor annoyed. They suddenly sat down in the middle of the dance floor. “Hey, your beard needs trimming,” the girl said.

“Let’s talk about literature,” Kenny said, ignoring her.

Flap was lying full length on the floor, his arms over his eyes. He had drunk twice as much as anyone else—everyone observed it—yet he held it well. Patsy had danced with him for an hour while he was getting drunk. “Bringing It All Back Home” was on the phonograph.

“I hate literature,” Flap said. “Don’t we all?”

“Not me,” Emma said “I hate mornings. I also hate cereal. It’s so goddamn unpleasant to look at, once it soaks up. Some cereals particularly.”

“Don’t hate literature,” Kenny said gloomily. He had been smoking pot, as had his stocky girl. “Hate the English department if you want to. Fuck the English department, in fact.”

“Fuck Post cereals,” Emma said. “I don’t like them.”

Patsy drank more punch. She felt lighter still, and happier. Hank was stroking the inside of her hand with one finger. Lee Duffin looked quiet and thoughtful. Peter lay stretched out on the floor with his head in her lap. Lee stroked his forehead. Patsy suddenly found herself liking Lee enormously, for her poise, for her courage, for her kindness to Peter. She found herself liking everyone enormously: Emma, who went on morning after morning feeding her boys cereal; Flap, who went on day after day studying for prelims, and who drank well at parties; Kenny, for having the party; even the stocky girl friend, for being so tolerant of Kenny. She had not been to a party in a long time and had forgotten the feelings that swept over her; she had a strong sense of being involved along with everyone else in the ruin of something. What was being ruined scarcely mattered: a civilization, a generation, or only the summer, or only an evening, or perhaps only themselves. What seemed important was that they were all in it together. No one seemed unhappy, and yet no one was likely to be spared. She drank some more and peeled her wet blouse loose from her chest. “The humidity is getting worse,” she said.

Kenny Cambridge took offense at her remark. “It ticks me off,” he said. “Here we are, the smartest people around, and nobody wants to talk about literature.”

“Why should we talk about literature?” Flap asked. No one had an answer.

“I’d rather have an orgy,” the stocky girl said, startling everyone.

“I vote against it,” Lee said mildly.

“Me too,” Patsy said. “There’s nothing I’d rather not see than all of you naked.”

To everyone’s dismay, Peter asked Kenny to read some of his poems aloud. Everyone else had been grimly determined never to ask Kenny to read. Kenny went to an old scratched-up desk and opened a drawer, and a huge cockroach ran out and across the desk.

“Shit,” Kenny said. “A cockroach was in my poems.”

“Maybe it was Kafka,” Emma said. She looked like she was getting sleepy.

Kenny hastily read a poem. There was silence. “You’re all too drunk to appreciate me,” he said.

“Let’s talk about Norman Mailer,” Flap said.

“Kenny made me read
The American Dream,”
the stocky girl said. “I didn’t see anything so good about it.

“I hear he acts crazy,” she added, yawning and scratching her stomach.

“Don’t put him down,” Kenny said angrily.

“I wasn’t.”

“I didn’t like that story that happened in the loft,” Emma said. Her eyelids were falling.

“Why are we talking about him?” Patsy asked. She was annoyed at Hank because he didn’t say anything. She wanted very badly for him to say something brilliant. She felt she might stop loving him if he didn’t. But he said nothing; he didn’t even seem to be listening intelligently. It worried her. She could not help wondering if he was smart, and she didn’t want to wonder such a thing.

“We could talk about Mary McCarthy,” she said.

“What’s there to say about her?” Flap asked.

“She was one of Edmund Wilson’s wives,” Lee said. She was amused by it all.

“Well, what’s so good about Edmund Wilson?” Kenny said. “It’s always Edmund Wilson this, Edmund Wilson that. Who told him he could be the boss of literature?”

“Don’t be impertinent,” Flap said. “Edmund Wilson isn’t even on a faculty. How could he be the boss of literature? Northrop Frye’s the boss of literature at the moment. There are some regional bosses. F. R. Leavis is the boss at Cambridge. Lionel Trilling is the boss at Columbia. Yvor Winters is the boss on the West Coast.”

“I don’t believe in anal intercourse, anyway,” Emma said drowsily.

“Quit mumbling,” Flap said. “Nobody was talking about it. We’re talking about the administration of literature.”

“Sorry,” Emma said. “Let Patsy talk. She never gets to express herself.”

“This department is a collection of turds,” Kenny said sincerely.

“They’re just a bit Galsworthian,” Flap said mildly. “I don’t mind. Why should you mind?”

“That’s very condescending,” Emma said. “I like most of them very much.”

“Fuck you,” Flap said. “Go on to sleep.”

A sullen young couple nobody liked were arguing in the corner, as they had been all evening, passing marijuana back and forth to each other. “We would be just like them if we were married,” Patsy said to Hank. Her sense of doom was deepening.

“Why don’t you stop drinking and take Emma home,” Patsy said to Flap. “She has to get up in the morning.”

“Emma is old enough to solve her own problems,” he said. He looked oddly haggard and was drinking again.

Lee and Peter left, and Hank and Patsy followed them. Lee and Peter were holding hands. “So it’s really true,” Patsy said. “I saw Bill two days ago. I guess he knows and doesn’t care. Everyone sleeping with everyone and some caring and some not. I’m getting sick. I don’t like being drunk.”

On the corner of Dunlavy and South Boulevard she was sick. Hank made her sit on the curb to rest a minute. “It’s awful,” she said. “Now Jim has a girl friend. Only he doesn’t sleep with her.” She was sick again. “We’re not even equals in sin,” she said, beginning to sob.

At home she washed her face and felt much better. All evening at the party she had wanted Hank to touch her. Her skin had wanted that, even when she was annoyed with him. She turned the lights out and went to the couch where he was, only to find that she no longer wanted it. She still wanted to want it, but she had gone cold; the heat and the need had gone. She didn’t want it to have gone; she became desperate for the heat to come back. She was sure that if they made love it would, for she had never made such love as they had made in the last four days. She was sure it would come back, but it didn’t. It did for Hank, but not for her. The harder she tried the less good it did to try, and afterward she was almost sick again, not nauseated but disappointed and confused. “It’s ruined,” she said. “Even that’s ruined now.”

“It was just the liquor,” Hank insisted. The look in her eyes scared him. It was the first time in weeks he had not been able to reach her.

“Don’t go yet,” she said. She did not want to be left cold and dreary and a mess. He held her and she grew very sleepy and went to sleep, her face against his arm.

Then Hank was shaking her in the dark. It was very hard to understand. She just wanted to sleep. There was a very distant ringing. “Wake up,” he said. “Your phone’s ringing.”

That was the ringing. It was an awful feeling. She could not move. Hank turned on a small lamp. Their clothes were strewn about the couch. Her legs were shaky. Finally she reached the phone, blinking in the light. “It will be Jim,” she said fearfully, as if he would be able to see through the phone, into the room.

But it wasn’t Jim. It was Sonny Shanks.

“I was about to give up,” he said. “Sorry to get you up.”

It seemed a miracle that it wasn’t Jim. “That’s all right,” she said. “I was very sound asleep.”

“Got bad news,” he said. “Jim had an accident. It ain’t gonna be fatal or nothing like that, but he’s kinda busted up.”

“God,” she said, shock breaking through her drowsiness. “What? A car wreck?”

“Sort of,” Sonny said. “We was at a rodeo and he borrowed a horse from an old boy I know. He just wanted to ride around a little. The horse wasn’t very well broke. Something spooked him and he kinda had a runaway. Ran into a car and threw Jim into another car. Nobody hurt but Jim. Awful bad luck.”