Moving On (89 page)

“Why?”

Patsy looked at him thoughtfully. “Because enjoying it’s the only security we’ll ever have,” she said. “I have to go attend to some gore.”

The morning rain was colder than it had looked through the window. For a time Patsy was in two places at once. She was driving to the Hortons’, but at the same time she hadn’t quite left the bedroom. It made mopping up the dried blood no task at all—it didn’t affect her. She mopped carefully but automatically, her mind carrying her backward and forward. Then she took the bucket of water and emptied it behind the garage, wrung out the old mop, and hung it on Emma’s clothesline. The back yard was soppy. When she had gone in to get the mop there had been sounds in the boys’ room, so she decided to go up and fix them breakfast. She came upon both boys in the kitchen, and both were looking forlorn. Tommy had climbed up on the cabinet and was eating Quisp straight from the box, by the handful. Teddy had been unable to negotiate the cabinet and sat on the floor looking up at Tommy. Occasionally Tommy let two or three pieces of cereal fall to the floor and Teddy picked them up and ate them, looking very small and woebegone. When Patsy turned on the kitchen light they blinked.

“No one was around to feed us,” Tommy said.

“So I see.”

“We were very hungry.”

“Well, don’t make a big thing of it. It’s only seven and I’m here to feed you. How you, Teddy?”

“Me no have bery much Quisp,” Teddy said, sighing. He got up and went like a streak to his highchair, convinced that now that an adult female had appeared breakfast must inevitably follow. Sure enough it did. She managed to get a respectable amount of juice, toast, cereal and egg down them. Both clamored for bacon but she couldn’t locate any. “Bacon,” Teddy kept saying brightly, as if by tossing the word at her he would eventually force her to produce some.

“Hush,” she said. “There’s no bacon today. Nibble on your toes, or something.”

Both boys regarded the remark as immensely amusing and risqué. Tommy repeated it and Teddy broke into hysterical laughter. Then he peered at his toes to see if the suggestion seemed practical. Patsy obliged Teddy by reading descriptions of what could be had from various cereal companies. The chatter was lively, but in her mind she kept going back to the place where she had been all night. Teddy, the bon vivant, blew her kisses from his sticky palm. While they were chattering, Mrs. Greenway arose and swept in like a Spanish galleon, her enormous purple housecoat billowing about her. Her hair also billowed. “I might have known you boys would be up before me,” she said.

“We’re always up before everybody,” Tommy assured her.

Just as Patsy was about to leave, Emma called. Her voice sounded cracked.

“You okay?” Patsy asked.

Emma said she was and that she would be home in an hour, and Patsy left. Driving home, she began to feel tired. The night had become last night, not something she was still in, though her body still held the memory of it. She parked the Ford and yawned and stretched and got out. Perhaps Davey would let her sleep. She found them in the kitchen—Davey was getting his breakfast. After the din at the Hortons’ it was almost abnormally quiet for a scene in a kitchen. Davey grinned when he saw her, but not Jim. She was pulling her wet scarf off her head when she looked at Jim, and saw at once, with a shock like a fist hitting her chest, that everything was changed. Something had happened. His face was terrible. Even before they spoke she knew what had happened, knew that, after all, she was hung.

2

“W
HAT
’
S WRONG
? What happened?” she said, her wet scarf in her hand. She knew, but thought for a second that it might be something else, some catastrophe in his family or hers. It needn’t be her that had changed his face so.

“You know what’s wrong,” Jim said, giving Davey another bite of baby food.

Patsy walked past them to the cabinet, to the place where she had stood when the news of Flap came. She was numbed and frightened past speech. She didn’t want to turn around and look at Jim.

“No, I don’t,” she said with her back to them.

“Emma called just after you left the hospital last night. She forgot to tell you to ask me to bring Flap some books.”

Patsy was silent. A lie occurred to her. She could say she fell asleep in the car in the hospital parking lot. Or that she went to the Hortons’ to clean up the garage and fell asleep there. But the lie never got to her throat. She didn’t have the energy to lie, or the pride. She felt too numb, and anyway, she could not lie to Jim with him looking so hurt. Lying was easy when he was complacent, when he was happily taking her for granted, but it was not possible when he was sitting feeding Davey and looking crushed.

She turned and went over to the table. Davey smiled at her. The smile didn’t reach her, but she bent and kissed him on the forehead from habit.

“Want to fix his bottle?” Jim asked. “He won’t eat much more of this.”

Patsy looked vaguely at Davey and got up to fix the bottle. She forgot for a moment where the bottles were, so numb was her mind. She began to wish Jim would talk. It was a time when speech would have helped, even the bitterest, angriest speech. But he seemed as voiceless as she was.

When she had fixed the bottle she got a rag and wiped Davey’s face and hands and took him out of the highchair. He leaned back in her lap and guzzled his milk, but his presence didn’t matter, for once. It didn’t lighten anything.

“Please go on and accuse me,” she said, facing Jim finally. “I’m not worth your getting that hurt about. Did you think I was off getting murdered or something?”

“Oh, for a few minutes I did. Then it occurred to me where you were.”

“How?”

“I’m not so dumb,” Jim said. “Hank doesn’t have a girl this year and you get strange every time I mention him. I was thinking about spying on you but this saved me the trouble.”

“You could have asked,” she said. “I might have told you the truth.”

“Would you have?”

“I don’t know,” she said tiredly. “Maybe if you’d asked at the right time. Maybe not. I really don’t know.”

He stood up and got himself another cup of coffee. “Want some?” he asked politely, but she shook her head. “Why him?” he asked when he sat back down. “That’s what I’ve been wondering most of the night.”

Patsy shrugged, flat and discouraged and ashamed. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. The sick feeling that filled her made the question unanswerable. Why Hank? The night that only an hour before had seemed worth much turned its other side to her memory. With Jim’s new, older face looking at her from across the table the hours that had seemed beautiful while they were happening seemed in memory only common and sordid. She could not remember them as being worth very much, certainly not what they had cost her.

“I don’t guess I understand you very well,” Jim said. “I thought you were the most virtuous woman alive.”

Patsy winced; feeling tightened her throat, but she didn’t cry. “Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t say things like that.”

“Okay,” Jim said mildly. “I guess I idealize you too much. I guess in a way it’s mostly my fault.”

But Patsy liked that even less. She shook her head, bent over and knocked Davey’s baby bottle out of his hand accidentally. He was indignant and she picked it up.

“You needn’t go assuming the fault,” she said. “I was the one who was out all night.”

Davey looked at his bottle and popped the nipple back into his mouth. He looked up at his mother as he sucked, and Patsy smiled at him. She loved the way his jaws worked.

“Well, I mean I probably drove you away.”

He got up and left the room and Patsy sat where she was while Davey took the bottle. She felt tired and slightly sick; she felt immobile. It was an effort to move her fingers. Then, when Davey was finished, she had a moment of worry about Jim and went to the bedroom. He was dressed to go out.

“I’ll take Flap some books,” he said.

“Are you okay?” she said, coming closer. “I don’t want you imitating him, no matter how bad I’ve been.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

She sighed, very troubled. Jim puzzled her, but she didn’t feel she had any right to question him or criticize him. The room seemed unfamiliar. She was not sure she had any right in the room at all, or any right anywhere. There was a very long silence. It seemed to her that much ought to be being said, but she could not start it. She could only wait for whatever was going to be meted out to her. It was disturbing to think that nothing was going to be meted out to her, that nothing would be said and the terrible indefiniteness allowed to continue. Anything would be better than prolonged indefiniteness, it seemed to her.

Jim was staring at the books in the bookcases. “I thought maybe you just went by to tell him about Flap,” he said. “I even got a taxi at two
A.M
. and dashed over to see if that was where you were. Maybe I should have come up and had a fight with him and drug you home. But it would have involved leaving Davey too long. As it was I was only gone about four minutes. Do you think I should have come up?”

She tried to turn her mind to it but found the scene unimaginable. “No,” she said, “I would just have been mad at you for leaving Davey.”

“Probably,” he said.

“So what now?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you want a divorce?”

“No.”

She felt a quick relief. Davey had crawled over and was pulling himself up by clutching her clothes. The relief lasted only a minute and then was smothered by the stupor she felt.

“Why aren’t you beating me?” she said. “You used to say you’d kill me if I ever slept with anyone else.”

“That was when I didn’t believe it could happen,” Jim said. “That’s just the kind of thing you say. I don’t feel much like beating you. I feel more like holding on to you.

“I guess I don’t even feel much like beating him, really,” Jim said. “I’d sleep with you if I were him and got the chance.

“Of course you have to quit seeing him,” he added, looking at her.

“Of course,” Patsy said automatically. But then it struck her how extremely complicated every day was going to be from then on, and she dropped her head dispiritedly.

“Cheer up,” Jim said, attempting to look brisk. “We haven’t died. We’ll work it out. It’s not the end of everything.” When Patsy looked up he bent to kiss her. She took the kiss on her cheek and caught a glimpse of his eyes as he raised up. There was more hurt in them than in his words. He didn’t look like himself.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

But Jim attempted to be light. He juggled Davey a bit and picked up the books to go.

“When will you be back?” she asked. She wanted to have something to expect.

“Oh, after lunch.”

She stood up, suddenly distraught at the thought that he might meet Hank.

“Are you going to see him?” she asked.

“I’d just as soon not. I think I’ll cut the seminar today.”

They were silent again, both of them pondering the new complications of ordinary academic intercourse.

“I guess you’d better tell him to go away,” Jim said.

Patsy nodded, again automatically. “Shit,” she said. “I’ve ruined everybody. He went away once on account of me. If you hadn’t gone away I don’t think he would ever have come back. Now he’ll never get a degree and it’s all because I couldn’t behave.”

Suddenly she began to cry; the sense of the mess that she had made overwhelmed her. She sat down on the couch crying. Davey was distressed and Jim became impatient. Her tears seemed to annoy him more than her adultery.

“Now hush, damn it,” he said. “He had as much to do with it as you did, probably more. If he has to go, too bad. He’s a lousy graduate student, anyway—he’ll never get a doctorate. I don’t like you crying about him.”

“I’m not . . . just crying . . . about him,” she said. “I’m crying . . . about everything I’ve . . . ruined.”

She went on crying and Jim got a raincoat and wrapped the books he was taking in a newspaper. “I’m going to take these books to Flap,” he said. “It’s better than watching you cry.”

Patsy felt a moment of hatred for him after he had gone. She hoped he might have forgotten something and would have to come back, so she could tell him, while she felt it, that it was all his fault, that if he only wouldn’t run out on her at such times she wouldn’t have needed anyone else. But he didn’t come back and she couldn’t sustain the hatred. Why shouldn’t he go? Why should he stay to watch her cry? He was quite right. It was not his fault but hers for being weak, foolish, selfish, disloyal. And what she was going to do about it she had no idea, for she was still as weak, foolish, selfish, and disloyal as she had been before she was discovered.

Davey got used to her crying and she got a pillow off the bed and lay on the floor, so as to be at his level, and cried and sniffed and blew her nose while he played with his blocks, babbling emphatically.

While she was crying Emma called, asking if Jim had left with the books. Flap was better, she said, and she sounded better. She heard the tears in Patsy’s voice and asked what was wrong.

“Oh, nothing. We just had a fight. It’s nothing.”

“I guess the reason I feel so much better is because it’s not the sort of thing Flap would ever do twice,” Emma said. “What the hell. I can always
live
with him.”

“I’m not sure I can always live with Jim,” Patsy said. “However. I’m not going to bore you with my troubles after the kind of night you’ve had.”

“Your troubles don’t bore me. I don’t suppose you want the boys this afternoon. Momma seems to have a date.”

“Sure,” Patsy said, though she didn’t at all want the boys. It turned out, though, that they were a godsend. She spent a bad morning, tired, sick with herself, irresolute. She tried to sleep but Davey wouldn’t let her. She couldn’t think, couldn’t decide anything, didn’t feel she had the right to decide anything. All she could do was wait for Jim to tell her what he wanted of her, so she could try to do it. She gave little thought to Hank, who had even fewer rights in the matter than she did.