Moving On (85 page)

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I think there was something by him in
My Book House
. Did he write children’s books?”

“I’m not too big on him but the set was so cheap I couldn’t resist.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “Why did you have to buy these now? There must be a set of George Eliot closer than Scotland that you could get if you needed to write on her. Or you could even use a library book for a change.”

“Why not buy them? They were cheap.”

“That’s no reason to buy something. It’s a terrible reason to buy a book. I’d be willing to bet you won’t read ten pages of any one of these books in the next five years.”

“Bet me enough and I’ll read ten pages right now. If you’d hurry and go look at the Duffin house maybe we could move in January and then we’d have plenty of book space.”

“Oh, hell,” she said. “That’s a fine goddamn reason to buy a house. If you think I’m going to buy that house and sit and watch you turn into William Duffin you’re crazy.”

“What do you want a house for, then?” he asked. “It was your idea.”

“I want a house big enough that I can get away from you without going outdoors,” she said hotly. The sight of the stacks of books plus his patient quiet assurance that sooner or later she would decide what they should do angered her uncontrollably. For a moment all she wanted was revenge. She reached out a foot and kicked over a stack of George Meredith. Jim looked up. He was surprised to see how angry she was.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She got up as if to leave the room, but instead kicked the box the books had come in. “I want a house so maybe I can be happy,” she said, ashamed of herself for kicking the books.

“You wouldn’t be happy in Buckingham Palace,” he said. “Don’t be so goddamn childish. You don’t know that I won’t read these. I may read every one of them.

“You’re too spoiled to be happy,” he added, as if in afterthought. “If that’s why you want a house, let’s forget it. You’d just be disappointed once we moved in.”

“Go to hell,” she said. “You’re no one to call me spoiled. I took care of your son all summer while you played games with cameras and older women and went to rodeos and all that. You don’t care whether your son has a room of his own or not. It never occurs to you what other people might need.”

“Oh, it occurs to me. You’ve pointed out to me what you think you need every second day since we’ve been married.”

“A lot of goddamn good it’s done me,” she said. “Nothing’s changed yet.”

“Yes it has, you’re twice as profane,” he said. “You didn’t use to yell curses, just complaints. If I had a dollar for every time you’ve complained we could make a down payment on a house.”

“I wouldn’t live in that house if they gave it to us,” she said. “If you don’t like my language you can leave. This place is big enough for Davey and me.”

She began to cry and Jim tried to apologize, but every time he said anything to her she yelled at him and it woke Davey up and he cried too and was very agitated. She was a long time calming him. As she was standing by the baby bed stroking Davey’s back the anger went out of her and she felt terribly in the wrong and ashamed of herself.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said when Davey was asleep again. Jim was on the bed, resting his hip and looking gloomy. “I don’t know why I attacked you.”

“It’s all right. I guess it was unnecessary, buying those books.”

“No, buy all the books you want to. Why not? One of us will read them someday. But we have to have a house, see? So Davey can get away from us when I pick a fight with you.”

“I agree. The Duffins are certainly eager to sell.”

He tried to rub her back, to soothe her, but she didn’t want any back rubbing. “Do you think I ought to see a psychiatrist?” she asked.

“Why?” He was surprised.

“Because we keep having fights.”

“I’m sure everybody has fights.”

“But we don’t have anything else any more.”

Jim turned off the light and tried to pull her close to him, to comfort her. She didn’t resist, but as soon as he was asleep she began to edge away from him. Since his return she had not liked to sleep close to him. Every night she edged away and awoke in the morning to find herself on the very edge of the bed. She always awoke before he did and got up while he was asleep, so he didn’t notice. He had not noticed anything; only that her rages were more violent. Otherwise he treated her as if she were the Patsy she had been before the summer. It was partly a relief, partly a disappointment. He didn’t know who she was, and while that was good, it was also bad. She didn’t like feeling herself a stranger to her own husband.

The next morning Jim reminded her that he had asked Hank to dinner that evening. It was an occasion he insisted on and she dreaded it. For three weeks she had postponed it with one excuse after another, but there seemed no way to postpone it any longer. Yet the thought of it made her sick with tension. That afternoon, while Jim was in his nineteenth-century novel seminar, she went to Hank’s and was sick at her stomach from the tension. She lay on his couch fully dressed and white and cold at the contemplation of the evening and the mess her life was in.

Hank was sulky. He had hoped to make love. He was reading
The End of the Road
. The sight of the book made Patsy the more depressed. For some reason she connected the beginning of the end of her romance—her romance, as opposed to her affair—with her own reading of it, which had occurred about a month before. The book had been lying around Hank’s apartment for months before she grabbed it one day while hastening to the john. She read it straight through, growing more and more depressed with each turned page. She hated it but it fascinated her. She didn’t like anyone in it, neither Jacob Horner nor either of the Morgans, and she decided privately that the reason the book fascinated her was because it was a time in her life when she really didn’t like anyone, herself included. Only Davey was exempt from her blanket dislike. Emma was okay, but Emma was a pillar of virtue against which she could not comfortably lean. Jim and Hank and herself were as wretched a threesome as the one in Barth, it seemed to her.

Somehow the book made clear to her something that she didn’t want to know: that she was not in love with Hank. For a month or two she had had the strong if sporadic illusion that she was. She had been illusioning herself a grand passion, and at first, when everything was new, the illusion worked. Feeling blurred her vision for a while and life was beautiful; then, despite herself, her vision began to clear and she could not help seeing the man she was involved with. And the man she was involved with was not so remarkable as she had first supposed him to be. What it boiled down to, she had come to fear, was that he just happened to be a good lay, or the kind of lay she just happened to need at that time. Otherwise, he was really no better than Jim—not as smart, actually, and no stronger, if as strong. He had more animal stubbornness, but it was of a very selfish kind. For a while he kept her dazed with sex, and she was glad; she didn’t want to be objective about him. But then it ceased to daze her in quite the same way; she began to grow objective even before she left the bed.

At times she was angry with Nature herself for making her so physically vulnerable to someone who was going to turn out to be temporary, after all. She knew that even the best relationships were supposed to have gaps, but except for sex theirs was practically all gap. For one thing, Hank was too soft. The longer she knew him the more convinced she was that the only part of him that was ever hard was his penis. Otherwise he was quite yielding. He really didn’t want her to hang around long, once they had made love, because if she did they invariably got in an argument and Patsy invariably won. There was almost no point he wouldn’t yield if she pressed him hard enough. He was capable of temper, but not capable of really standing up against her onslaughts. She told him not to let her have her way, but he did, anyway, to her disgust.

When disappointment first began to dawn she tried to hide it from herself. She tried very hard to be in love. Sex was her way of trying, and it seemed, for a time, that it might be a sufficient way. She only realized it wasn’t going to be when it occurred to her one day that she wouldn’t want to marry him; there were too many things she didn’t like about him. She could not really visualize them outside his apartment. The thought that, after all, they were only temporary frightened her, and to escape from it she turned back to sex with a kind of voracity that amazed her. For a time she had only two modes, the carnal and the maternal. At home, in the late afternoon, she would bathe Davey and powder him and then sit with him in her lap, smelling his neck or behind his ears, thinking how very different a baby smelled from a man. She pressed her face against Davey’s neck and listened to him gurgle, or let him pull her hair, still calmed and subdued from the things she had done in the afternoon, only an hour or two earlier, when her face had been pressed against Hank’s neck, in a room where there were quite different smells.

Only Jim, slowly recovering, was left out of it all. He was nice; she was nice to him, but never came close enough to him to notice that he had a smell. It saddened her. She wept for him and for them sometimes when she noticed him looking lonely, or when it occurred to her how much he must need; but he could do nothing about her and she could do nothing about herself.

And he seemed to suspect nothing at all about Hank, which was the reason she had not been able to get out of the awkward dinner. “Couldn’t you pretend to be sick?” she asked, looking over at Hank, who was still reading.

“No,” he said. “I did that once. I could bring Kenny. He loves your dinners. Or would you rather I brought a date.”

“Shut up,” she said. “Would you get me a Coke?”

He did, and she sipped it unhappily. “How did it get this way?” she asked. “It was wonderful for a month or two, and now it’s a hopeless mess.”

“Maybe I should go away again,” he said without looking at her.

Patsy gave him a dark look. “Why?” she said.

“To end the mess.”

“Sure,” she said. “Go on, desert me. It’s exactly what I deserve. When are you thinking of going? Shall I pack you a lunch?”

“I wasn’t thinking of going. I just said it.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember now. Your remarks originate in the larynx, not the brain.” She belched and felt a little better.

He looked hurt, and she began to feel sorry for him. “Don’t leave,” she said later. The fact that she didn’t really love him didn’t change much. She was still involved with him, still wanted him to come sit by her. “There’s no reason a mess can’t go on forever,” she said when he came and sat by her.

“It will drive you crazy.”

“So what,” she said. “Anything for novelty. You’ve never asked me to leave him and marry you, you know.”

“I know you too well,” Hank said.

“I don’t like being known that well,” she said and was silent. She lay blankly for fifteen minutes; she had ceased to believe in anything—love, decency, peace, anything. A fog of depression covered her; somehow Hank sneaked into it and aroused her. The fog dispersed, but there were problems even in the sunlight. She had grown more uninhibited—there was no point in being an inhibited adulteress, that she could see—and wanted to do something new, but Hank wouldn’t let her. He was prudish about himself; he liked to do it his own simple way. Several times, trying to explore her new feelings, she had been rebuffed. It hurt her; she couldn’t understand it or make him talk about it, but she kept hoping. It hurt again that he rebuffed her, but she was too glad to be out of the fog to want to fight about it.

They did it his way and it went well, so well, unfortunately, that Hank was moved to brag. “Pretty effective, huh?” he said.

She didn’t answer; the cold fog had moved back in. She got up and didn’t touch him the rest of the day. “I wish you weren’t coming to dinner,” she said as she was leaving.

“Why?”

“Because you make me feel small,” she said. And she cried a few tears of self-pity on the way home. She couldn’t believe she would ever have a grand passion or a man who was really right for her; she was not even having as wild an affair as she could have handled. Dreariness was what she deserved, and dreariness was what she was going to get.

The dinner, however, turned out to be pleasant, and the thanks were largely due to Kenny Cambridge. Kenny was going to pieces as spectacularly as it was possible for someone unspectacular to go to pieces. The university had long since come to regret its investment in him, but so much had been invested that there was nothing to do but lead him along the path toward the Ph.D. His hair was as long as it would grow, but it refused to hang down and stuck straight out from his head. He had adopted old fatigues as his uniform, with a yellow scarf for color, and his beard hung down in the way his hair ideally should have. He had decided, improbably and at the last minute, that he wanted to be a medievalist, as a means of escaping the sterility of modern literature, and had decided to make his thesis a verse translation of
Bevis of Hamptoun
. The department had okayed the project, mostly because they were too bored with Kenny to help him think up a viable topic; but as it became apparent that he was giving
Bevis
an extremely free, almost Ginsbergian, rendering, opposition to his project had begun to mass itself.

His chubby mistress had dropped out of school and gone to work for the phone company, to help support them, but she had gotten fired. Her parents, who had moved to Houston, would not have tolerated her living with Kenny, so it was necessary for him to pretend he was living somewhere else. What that meant was that he had to keep his clothes in a suitcase in the garage. They were not many, but it was still inconvenient, and if her mother happened to appear too early in the morning he would have to hide in a closet while she chattered with her daughter. To make the arrangement even more bizarre, they had decided to get a pet; not liking dogs, they got a parakeet. Unfortunately they had not noticed that the parakeet had only one leg. It seemed a small matter, but, as it developed, the bird’s one leg got tired from time to time and he would collapse off his perch with much fluttering and racket, usually while Kenny and his girl were making love. Kenny took a huge enjoyment in the idiosyncrasy of his own decline, and also a huge enjoyment in Patsy’s veal scallopini, which was quite good. The chubby mistress was there also, bland and silent as a fruit.