Moving On (84 page)

“He is sort of like Dad,” Flap said, still racked with memory. “It just doesn’t show yet.”

“It must to you,” she said, leaning her head against his shoulder for a minute. Then she left him and went back to bed and in a few minutes Flap came too, much calmed. He gave his wife a kiss when he got in bed. Neither of them felt sexy, but they didn’t feel sleepy either, and they lay awake for an hour, talking of Flap’s father and of Emma’s, and holding hands.

20

B
Y THE END OF
O
CTOBER
Patsy knew in full what was meant by duplicity. In spirit and in flesh, she knew, and it was no mere romantic schizophrenia, a matter of being two women in the same skin. She was two women in two different skins—women of differing minds and differing hearts. Her days lost all consistency; pleasure and distress, desire and shame beset her by turns, and she never knew in the morning which skin she would wear in the afternoon. “Who said love was fun?” she said one day, tugging on a blue sweater. She was the old Patsy, shamed, stiff, depressed. Her hair was tangled. But when Hank kissed her she grew soft and sullen and felt like biting. “It’s something but it’s not fun,” she said a few minutes later. And once she had changed skins again she looked wearily at the rumpled bed where she had been when she was someone else. “Of course it’s not love, either,” she said, putting her comb in her purse.

Hank yawned; he didn’t believe her. For him it was certainly love. He was as blank in his desire as he had been at first. Patsy looked at him hostilely, angry that he still understood her so little. He really noted nothing except her body—it was her body he knew, not her. He behaved as if, so far as he knew, they would go on making love every day forever. He hadn’t noticed that something had already changed, that she no longer came to him every day so suffused with feeling that she couldn’t think. She might come eagerly, she might come reluctantly, she might be happy or she might be sad, but she was no longer mindless, and she was seldom carried out of herself, no matter how well they made love.

She sat on the bed, dressed to leave, and looked at him, aware of an odd disappointment. There were so many men in the world—who was he, from whose bed she had just risen? Why him? He scarcely spoke to her. There must be many for whom she could feel everything she had first felt for him. It made her feel strange. She wanted him to be unique and irreplaceable, the only man she could care about, someone who could hold her. And yet the moment she thought it she knew it wouldn’t be so.

“Something’s changing,” she said.

“You’re getting sexier,” Hank said.

Patsy shook her head, though it was true enough. Physically things were very satisfactory between them.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant it when I said it wasn’t love.”

Hank was silent, his usual defenses were caught unprepared by her directness.

“Maybe I was just desperate for someone to want me the way you do,” she said, looking him in the eye. Hank was scared by the calmness in her face when she spoke. He would have fallen back on his second defense, which was sex, but Patsy was dressed to go and he knew he couldn’t reach her. He didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” she said. “I warned you. Enjoy your delusions. If you want to be the love of my life you’ve got to do more than screw me.

“I just thought I’d tell you,” she added as she was leaving. He looked pained and puzzled, and she felt sorry for him as she walked home. He didn’t really know anything else
to
do. That night at home she became very silent and felt more completely alone than she had ever felt. She had two men, two nice men, even; and no confidence that either of them was going to do.

Before the month was gone she had had to recognize that something was dying. The season was taking with it a version of herself, one Patsy of the two that had come to exist. She knew that the summer had changed her, but she was a long time admitting that the change was permanent. She wanted to go back to being the Patsy she had been before the summer—the Patsy who lived with and cared for Jim. The other Patsy, the Patsy who slept with Hank, was not acceptable. That Patsy had no right to exist; she deserved no recognition and no consideration. She was the result of some unwanted revolution of the blood—she was illegal and irresponsible. One thing both Patsys agreed upon was that the two of them could not possibly co-exist, not in the same town, in the same garments, moving among the same people.

October came and went, more like summer than fall, and yet like fall also. Patsy felt a terrible solstice approaching; she didn’t want it to come but she knew of no way to avert it. For her it was no mellow season, but a time of gorging, of swollen hours that the cool, quiet, fastidious woman that she sometimes was could not recollect pleasantly. Only occasionally, in between times, was she the Patsy she was sure of.

Those times were always when she was home, with Jim and Davey. Then, more than ever, she dreaded the solstice. When she was in quiet moods the thought of change seemed dreadful—why should anything change? It was emotion that blurred everything; if only she could keep calm and look at matters clearly for a few days then she might be able to straighten herself out, align her emotions with her responsibilities and keep anything really bad from happening. Calmness and clarity were what she needed, and a few simple feelings that she could not doubt.

Davey, at least, was still simple, and at times Jim seemed simple too. At night, watching television with him, or reading beside him in bed, he sometimes seemed far nicer than she gave him credit for being. His needs were not desperate or extreme and he was probably less complex than she made him out to be. It occurred to her at times that all he needed was humoring, of a skillful and considerate kind. He needed lightness and chatter and food and for her to be lovely, and Davey well, and a pursuit to be involved in, and a modicum of sex—for so little as that he could be happy, a thought that only made her the more distressed with herself. Even the little that he needed seemed not easily providable. She had the maddening feeling that something was ruining them, and the most maddening thing about the feeling was the sense that if she could ever for one moment put her finger on the exact cause of the decay, she could stop it. Probably the root of the trouble was herself: her selfishness, her feverishness, her foolish destructive desire for things Jim could not give. Half the time she was convinced that their troubles were all her fault; the other half she was convinced they were all
his
fault. She could not rid herself of the conviction that he was playing games he ought to have outgrown. He didn’t want enough; she wanted too much. Neither of them could quite determine the nature of what it was that was lacking.

Four times in one week, in the middle of October, she had fits of causeless incoherent weeping because she felt the hopelessness of ever having what she wanted. And yet she was as distrustful of her sorrows as she was of her happiness, on the days when she was happy. Some days, when things went well with Hank, her spirits rose very high, and she felt it was more natural to be happy than to be unhappy. It might only be a matter of sticking to simple tasks. Davey was a good age to be taken about in the world, and taking him about was a delight. Safety, happiness, normalcy, even gaiety seemed to lie in the simplest domestic tasks—in cooking breakfast, in buying new sheets, in giving Davey his bath. Breakfasts and baths and shopping she handled splendidly. If happiness lay in handling such things splendidly then she was enviable. But if happiness lay in large things rather than small, in the fulfillment of major needs and adequacy to major responsibilities, then she felt lost. Honor and honesty, fidelity, responsibility, duty, love, all did less for her spirits than buying baby clothes and cooking waffles. There were days when the ability to cook a good breakfast seemed the only hope for her character.

William Duffin was reading a great deal of psychology, prefatory to attempting a major biography, and he had devoted most of his fall seminar to a discussion of psychoanalytic biography and its possibilities. Jim dutifully brought home the works of the various psychologists Duffin recommended, and Patsy, who still could not resist snooping in whatever he was reading, read sections of books by Ernest Jones, Erik Erikson, Norman O. Brown, Philip Rieff, and R. D. Laing. At first she felt intensely interested and cheered and rather hopeful. She skipped from book to book, always with the sense that the next chapter or the next page might reveal to her why she was in trouble and tell her what she might do to get out. Everything seemed somehow applicable, and yet, as it turned out, nothing she came to was precisely applicable, or even helpful. She still fought with Jim, yearned to be out of trouble, slept with Hank; she was even beginning to fight with him too. Before long the psychology began to depress her. The terminology that had been briefly fascinating began to seem turgid, and the insights that for a time had seemed dramatic began to seem monotonous and depressing. At the end of two weeks she went back to magazines and fiction. Every time she opened one of the psychologists she ended up feeling more hopeless than she had been feeling. The books were not going to help.

They did increase her vocabulary, though, and made her more formidable in argument.

“I’m getting rid of you any day now,” she told Hank one morning. “You’re nothing but an ego support. I’ll find someone else to support my feeble ego.” For no good reason she had gone from one bed directly to another and she was disgusted with herself.

“I love you,” he said. “What’s wrong with me? You’re always criticizing me now.” It was true, and it puzzled him.

“In the main you’re rather uninteresting,” she said, yawning.

“In the main?”

“Sure. Isn’t that a good graduate school phrase? In the main you’re kind of dull.” And she smiled at him cheerfully, in a way that bothered him; he couldn’t tell if she really thought he was dull or not.

“Why do you sleep with me then?” he asked, offended.

“Why not?” she said, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. “Ladies are sometimes attracted to dullards, I guess. My wretched body has an affinity for you. So what? I’ll conquer it yet.”

“You talk too much,” Hank said, turning on his stomach.

“So I’ve been told,” she said.

That night at home she had a fit, and for very little reason. She had only seen Hank for an hour that morning, and short visits left her with an edge. When she took the edge home and it encountered some tension there, such grip as she had on herself was destroyed and anything might happen.

In this case the fit was over books. Rice had secured, for one year, a famous visiting professor, an old crony of Duffin’s whose speciality was the nineteenth-century novel. Jim and most of the other graduate students had been herded into his seminar, and Jim soon had another hero to worship. He began buying books again, this time nineteenth-century novels. When Patsy got home from Hank’s a large box had arrived from a bookseller in Scotland and the very sight of it made her fume. All their bookshelves were full, there was absolutely no room for more books until they moved, if they moved, and it annoyed her that he had ordered more. She had read more of the books than he had, anyway, and the new box was a very large one.

The contents, it turned out, were forty-four volumes, twenty-six of George Eliot and eighteen of George Meredith. Jim unpacked them after supper, delightedly, while she was putting Davey to bed. Davey liked to lie on his back and contemplate the ceiling when put to bed, and Patsy would often stand by the baby bed awhile, tickling his stomach or letting him clutch her fingers. He had developed a vocabulary of meaningless sounds, which she interpreted and answered as she chose. It was a pleasant time. When Davey got sleepy he generally rolled abruptly on his stomach and was gone as quickly, it seemed to her, as Jim went when he was ready for sleep. Such little resemblances, already noticeable, touched her and disquieted her. It was fine that he should have his father’s charm, but not all of his father’s habits, and she had the feeling that there might be very little she could do about it.

When she turned from Davey, Jim was sitting on the couch writing his name in pencil in each of the books. She came over and sat down on the couch and picked up a volume of George Meredith, frowning.

“Why do you write your name in every volume?” she asked. “Why not just in the first volume?”

“Oh, habit,” he said. “Suppose someone borrowed
Felix Holt the Radical
and didn’t get around to reading it for a year. They might forget whose it was.”

“Personally I’d be just as glad if someone carried off
Felix Holt the Radical
and kept it forever,” she said.

“You’re a woman. You have no sense of the comprehensive.”

“I don’t like remarks prefaced by ‘You’re a woman.’ My sex has nothing to do with it and I don’t see where comprehensiveness comes in.”

“If you’re going to have an author you might as well have him complete,” Jim said.

“I think that’s dull. It makes more sense just to have the books you like. I’m never going to want to read
Felix Holt the Radical
and neither are you.”

“How do you know? Maybe I’ll have to do a paper on it someday.”

“Great. Where do we put them while we’re waiting for you to get assigned one of them?”

“I guess they can go in a closet until we move,” he said. “Or else I’ll box some of the paperbacks and put them in a closet.

“No fair,” Patsy said, picking up another volume of George Meredith. “I read the paperbacks. Who is this man? I never heard of him.”

“Sure you have. George Meredith.”

But Patsy had never heard of George Meredith, that she could remember, and was irked to be made to feel that she ought to have. “I’m not a graduate student,” she said. “I don’t know everything. What did he write that’s good?”

“You’ve heard of him,” Jim insisted. He was rather pleased that she hadn’t—she had few enough glaring gaps.
“The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
and
The Egoist”