Moving On (93 page)

“Why are you doing that?”

“So I won’t get sick. I’m going to sleep here from now on, so I won’t get sick.”

He saw that his plan had come to ruin, and he felt a failure. He felt he had treated her badly and would have apologized if he had not sensed that she was too alienated to be touched by apology.

“How do you feel?” he asked finally.

“Animal,” Patsy said. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Animal?”

She raised up and looked at him. “I feel like a domestic animal. Domestic animals are used without their consent. I was used without my consent. Don’t you touch me any more. You don’t have that kind of rights over me.”

Jim let it go. He knew from the way her voice trembled that arguing would only make things worse. The next day they tried to assess the extent of the disaster and it seemed incalculable.

“Well, at least forgive me,” Jim said. “You know I didn’t mean to be that awful. I was just trying to get you back.”

Patsy could not look at him. “You never wait for anything,” she said. “If you had waited and been kind I might have come back by myself.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” he said. “You would just have thought I was neglectful.”

She chuckled bitterly. “You get full points for not being neglectful,” she said. “Boy, are you not neglectful!”

They talked around in circles for several days. Sometimes they had the illusion that they were getting somewhere, in talking; other times it just made them feel the more hopeless. Patsy slept on the couch. They gradually worked back to a condition of politeness, but there they stopped. Nothing he said could bring Patsy back to the bed. A week passed and their nerves were in terrible states. Patsy had begun to fly off the handle at Davey. Jim stayed away from home as much as possible. At night she slept poorly, half afraid he would come to the couch and touch her, and he slept fitfully, felt wronged, and didn’t know whether she would ever sleep with him again.

One morning at breakfast psychiatry occurred to them. For some reason it had never entered their minds that they should go to psychiatrists, and the idea struck them like a revelation. It was the only hopeful idea they had had in weeks. They spent the day asking around, rather fruitlessly. The Hortons knew no psychiatrists. Flap had meant to go to one after his trouble, but once he got his spirits back he became too busy to bother. Finally Jim asked Bill Duffin, who knew one. Lee had gone to him for two weeks, after they moved to Houston. Patsy called to ask her about him. She and Lee had developed a sort of cynical compatibility. Lee had not asked about Hank, but Patsy took it for granted that she had figured it out.

“The man’s absurd,” Lee said of the psychiatrist. “He’ll do to talk at but don’t expect much feedback. I wouldn’t let you go to him except that I expect you need some laughs.”

It was not an encouraging report, but the two of them were too cheered by the idea of psychiatry to look further. They called the doctor, whose name was Fuller, and intimated that they had a problem.

Dr. Fuller suggested that they come in singly, but both on the same day, for what he termed exploratory conversations. Jim went first and told Dr. Fuller that his wife had had an affair and didn’t like to sleep with him, and that he didn’t know what to do. Jim talked rapidly for fifty-five minutes. Patsy went in an hour later and found it difficult to talk at all. Dr. Fuller looked more like a pediatrician than a psychiatrist, and, moreover, he had copies of
The Ford Times
in his waiting room, which prejudiced Patsy against him to begin with. He looked robust and healthy and so completely Protestant and trustworthy that it seemed unlikely he had ever committed a sin. Patsy felt guilty just being near him. She managed, rather haltingly, to get out the chronology of her marriage and her affair and he maintained such a determined silence when she spoke of the latter that she felt even guiltier.

“What do you do for fun, Mrs. Carpenter?” he asked, flabbergasting Patsy completely. She hadn’t had any in some time, and the last she could remember had involved Hank and a bed.

“I mean, what are your amusements?” he asked by way of clarification.

When she finally said she liked to read he nodded, as if it were very meaningful. When the hour was finally waning, with nothing significant having been said, Dr. Fuller briskly picked up the phone and made them appointments for a battery of psychological tests.

“Then we’ll know something,” he assured her merrily.

They took the tests the next day, Patsy in the morning, Jim in the afternoon. Patsy enjoyed them; she had always been good at tests. The man who gave them was a grave middle-aged gentleman named Mr. Penny. He took his job seriously and explained the tests in such detail that they would have been comprehensible to a three-year-old. She enjoyed the verbal tests and had a great time with the Rorschach.

Jim was not so lucky. After a year in graduate school, tests in which one arranged circles and triangles and matched words struck him as silly. He didn’t see how it was going to help. For him, the Rorschach was an absolute calamity. Virtually every blot looked like a vagina. Mr. Penny became even more grave and finally grew visibly upset.

“Are you sure you’re looking hard enough?” he asked after eight straight blots had been vaginas.

“There may be something wrong with my vision,” Jim said morosely. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it looks like.”

So did the next one, but he decided to lie in order to spare Mr. Penny’s sensibilities. He saw a pelvis.

“Well, that’s less specific,” Mr. Penny said hopefully, shifting his blots.

By stretching his imagination to the utmost, Jim managed to see a couple of crabs, a spider, and a butterfly. At his vaguest he saw a cloud. But there were still a scandalous number of blots that looked like nothing more than vaginas. Mr. Penny was deeply offended.

“Surely you can see something else,” he said sternly.

“No,” Jim said.

Mr. Penny searched among the blots to find one that could not possibly look like a vagina. “Your wife saw a coach-and-four,” he said nostalgically, after Jim saw another vagina.

“She would,” Jim said bitterly.

Their second interviews with Dr. Fuller were very dampening. “Your Rorschach was frankly appalling,” he told Jim immediately. “You saw fifty-two vaginas. Sex is not that important. You’ve got it out of proportion. It’s just one of a number of things we humans do. You shouldn’t keep it on your mind so much.”

“How can I help it?” Jim said. “My wife doesn’t like it with me.”

“Your wife is immature,” Dr. Fuller said. “Let’s forget her for the moment. You have to take yourself in hand. An obsession with sex is not going to help you. Mature people try to balance their activities.”

He told Jim that above all he should be firm with Patsy and realize that her feelings of repugnance were not personal but were the result of her own instability. They spent the last ten minutes of the hour discussing the vagaries of the Rice football team.

Patsy’s interview was even less satisfactory.

“You realize, don’t you, that your husband is very unhappy?” Dr. Fuller said.

“We’re both unhappy,” she said.

“Don’t you agree that it’s a wife’s duty to make her husband happy?” he asked, beaming at her.

“I guess. I’m sure it is. I just don’t know how to do it.”

“He doesn’t have much confidence right now,” Dr. Fuller went on. “Sexually he’s very insecure. He thinks you don’t like to sleep with him.”

“I don’t, very much,” Patsy said meekly.

“But, young lady,” Dr. Fuller said in his most jovial pediatrician’s voice, “you’re his wife. You’re grown up. Mature people can’t afford to be highly emotional about their duties. There are simply things we must do, for the good of our loved ones.”

Patsy was at a loss. It was not what she had expected of psychiatry. Reading the books Jim had brought home had grown depressing, but they all did seem to assume that life was rather complicated. Dr. Fuller clearly didn’t think so. No one had ever made her feel more unequivocally guilty.

“You and your husband have to take yourselves in hand,” he said. “You have to be adult. You’re both being rather childish. I have an idea you don’t go out enough. Go to some movies. Make him take you dancing. Enjoy yourselves. The more activities you share the better you’ll get along.”

“Isn’t there something more specific wrong with us?” she asked.

“Well, of course at the moment you’re both suffering from the consequences of your affair with the young man. I hope nothing like that will happen again. These things have no moral base, you realize. It’s no more than a form of escapism. What you must do is buckle down to reality.”

Patsy reported that bit of advice to Lee the next day and Lee laughed long and feelingly. “My own triumph was forcing him to utter the word cunnilingus,” she said. “I think he would rather have bitten his tongue off. Go buy some smart clothes. It’s really more cheering than psychiatry.”

Patsy went, but she had not been in the store more than five minutes when an awful depression came over her. She didn’t want to buy clothes. Why? Who for? What good would it do? When she got home Jim saw how depressed she was and asked her what was the matter.

“Everything,” she said. “I almost spent a lot of money today. I’m too young for that. You’re supposed to save that for when you’re forty or so.”

“Maybe we should buy things together,” Jim said. “Dr. Fuller said we should do things together.” The thought depressed them both. They could not even think of a pleasant way to spend money together. That night they went to their separate places of rest feeling very glum. Jim would have liked to ask her to come back to bed but held his peace. Patsy had begun to miss Hank. From time to time she was seized by a strong desire—she wanted to hear his voice, to feel his hands. The desire assailed her very strongly just after the lights were turned out. The room was silent in the way rooms are when they contain two waking people who are not in accord but who have grown wary of putting their discords into words. They might have talked, but neither could think of a way to start a conversation; and a conversation started on a bad note, in the wrong tone, could lead to anger, spleen, tears, and a tense sleepless night which neither of them wanted. What was hard to do was to have an after-dark conversation that might end nicely, with them feeling closer rather than more separated. It had grown almost impossible, and they played safe and stayed silent, each depressed. In only one week psychiatry had failed them, and neither of them knew where they might turn next.

6

J
IM BEGAN TO WONDER
if he could sleep with Clara Clark. Patsy had forbidden him the Hortons, so he took to spending his days around school looking for someone to talk to. Flap had launched into his dissertation and couldn’t be kept at coffee for more than fifteen minutes, so he wouldn’t do. Kenny Cambridge was sometimes someone to talk to, but he was lazy and generally lay around his apartment until the middle of the afternoon. He usually showed up just as it was time for Jim to go home. Most of the more intelligent older graduate students were writing dissertations and were as inaccessible as Flap, and none of the younger first-year people had yet emerged as interesting. That left Clara, and, as it happened, Clara was as much at loose ends as Jim.

Both of them were beginning to have serious doubts about their scholarly futures, and their doubts made a convenient conversation topic. The first year of study had been easy. Reading was pleasant and scholarship rather interesting, in an esoteric way. Writing papers was good mental exercise. The university seemed a handleable scene, as Clara put it.

But their summers changed all that. Clara had done nothing particularly unusual with hers; she had spent it in Santa Barbara, screwing and getting high. She had grown too old to surf, but she spent a lot of time on the beaches and had a satisfying summer. The difficulty was that during it she had ceased to feel very intellectual or very competitive or very interested in a degree and a job. Screwing and getting high were more her kind of scene.

Jim had done none of either, but he had not been back in class long before he discovered that it wasn’t all as pleasant as it had been the year before. Taking pictures on the movie set had been pleasant. The work, the talk, and the people had all been amusing. In contrast the people in graduate school did not seem very vivid. Even Flap seemed pedantic in contrast to Sonny Shanks and the young Californians who had been with the crew. Clara made him slightly homesick for them, and the stories he told her about the crew made her slightly homesick for California. They began to spend a lot of time in the student center talking about it all. They were both taking a Victorian seminar and both had term papers hanging over their heads, tasks they were eager to avoid. One day Jim confessed his marital problems. It was hard to write about Victorian poetry with something like that on his back, he said. Clara was sympathetic. His marital problems seemed nothing unusual, but she too was unable to think of anything coherent or original to say about Victorian poetry. They had a mutual recognition over coffee: they didn’t really like writing about literature and couldn’t possibly do it professionally all their lives. Being companions in failure made them feel closer, and they went to the zoo.

It almost turned out badly for Jim. No sooner were they inside than he ran into Peewee Raskin, returned again to his old job on the zoo train. He looked no older, no larger, and no more prosperous than he had the winter before. Peewee didn’t see them, but it gave Jim a start and made him realize that nothing was simple. Patsy could be there, for all he knew, or Emma and her boys could be there. He was nervous; Clara didn’t mind. She had merely gone along with the zoo suggestion to keep him with her. She would rather have gone to her place and to bed. She had always liked Jim’s looks. She felt fine and was very pleasant and vivacious. She knew that bed was where they were heading. If not today, tomorrow.

Jim hesitated only one day, brooding about what would happen, wondering if he could get away with it. But he remembered Eleanor Guthrie and what had happened when he hesitated with her. He didn’t mean for that to happen with Clara. He didn’t feel as emotional about Clara as he had about Eleanor, but he still had no intention of passing her up. Patsy was so remote—he didn’t know if he could ever get her back. He was anxious to have somebody, and Clara seemed willing.